


Riding Shotgun

by bythedamned



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Gen Fic, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-29
Updated: 2011-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-18 00:40:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/554987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bythedamned/pseuds/bythedamned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Sam doesn’t know how he can say his brother is dead when there’s still someone on this earth who looks at him like that."</i><br/>For the Winchesters, death is never the end.  Written for the 2011 spn_gen_bigbang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Riding Shotgun

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 [spn-gen-bigbang](spn_gen_bigbang.livejournal.com). Endless thanks to my LJ beta, [elveys-stuff](elveys-stuff.livejournal.com), and to my big bang artist, [kalliel](kalliel.livejournal.com). Her art is beautiful and adds so much more to this piece, and everyone should go check it out [ here](http://kalliel.livejournal.com/189373.html). Also, please forgive anything that doesn't work, I'm still learning AO3.

~*~

2009

~*~

The bitch of it is, there was nothing to set this hunt apart. Just another creature munching on bodily organs and leaving a bloody trail of clues behind. They’d put on wrinkled collared shirts to question the innocents, they’d called Bobby with a list of expletives and questions, in that order, and in the end they’d faced the thing down with all the right tools.  
   
Bastard fought hard, though. Dean had swung the machete, buried under peat moss three days and blessed by a shaman, while Sam chanted and intoned like a sped-up talking doll. But still, the thing just wouldn’t roll over. Towering and amorphous, it seemed to reform its slimy skin no matter how many times Dean tried to go all slasher movie on it. And maybe there should be some comfort in that, some solace, that it really did put up a fight. That it was a hard-won battle.  
   
Sam doesn’t think there’s solace to be found in anything, now that—  
   
Bobby’s mad, ‘cause Sam didn’t burn the body. He’d dragged that son of a bitch out of the mud hole it called a swamp and driven the blade home until he was sure its unearthly wailing couldn’t be anything other than a death rattle. Then he’d dragged it to the pyre, working by the light of the matches he’d struck to ignite the damn thing – made of water, it was, water and swamp juice – but first he’d sliced it open. Looking, hoping, carving away bit by bit, trying not to nick anything living, anything family. He looked for a distended stomach, full to nearly bursting, stretching like a balloon with the shapes of a face and hands of one very pissed off Winchester trying to punch his way out.  
   
But instead he’d found—  
   
Bobby wants action, wants Sam to show him where the thing went down, but Sam knows it won’t help. The creature’d sizzled on a heap of damp wood, crackling with the moisture. The fire had faded and swayed, dousing itself the more it melted the gelatinous body, removing all traces of anything unnatural, anything that had done _this_. It wasn’t until the blaze recovered and reached ever skyward that the heat licked through the numbness chilling Sam’s body.  
   
His hands had felt foreign and clumsy, his ears stuffed with cotton like a Molotov cocktail just waiting to be lit. Hell, he’d set the match to it himself, because—  
   
Because there was nothing. He’d cut through the spongy lining of the stomach, and he’d thrown himself into the swamp for hours, dredging up bits of anything he could curl his frozen fingers around, hoping and fearing in the same breath that it’d be something he recognized as even vaguely human. But he’d found nothing. In every place he searched, every organ he split open – maybe there were two stomachs? Three? Cows had four, so there had to be at least one more in there, right? Hiding his brother just out of sight? – There was nothing. Nothing left to burn.  
   
Nothing, even, to tuck away in his duffel, to mount firmly on the dash of the Impala as a silent travel companion for every mile Sam has left to go. Hell, Dean’s ring, anything, anything to…  
   
Instead he holes up in Bobby’s guest room, suddenly too spacious for little old Sam to sleep easy in, and refuses to come down. There’s nothing left to come down for. Bobby gives him a couple days, and then a couple more, before he’s busting past Sam’s door with a pep talk and a beer, face lined with worry and something more paternal than Sam wants to recognize. Dean wouldn’t want this, Bobby says. He loved him too, he promises. Sam just has to get out of bed, he has to. Because Dean’s finally restin’ easy, for good this time, and can’t that just be one goddamn ray of sunshine in the middle of this shitstorm?  
   
And yeah, Sam’s not braindead. Heaven is what he wants for Dean, if he really is kickin’ up his boots on fluffy cloud nine. Dean’s reached the promised land, and that makes Sam _happy_ , he’ll swear up and down, but what becomes of their brother act now? To the straggling half of their two-man team? What do you do when you only have half the mold, and the best you can make is a lumpy piece of clay with a clear impression that it could have been something better?  
   
When Bobby gives up he leaves the beer, but Sam can’t even drink it. Dean hated Bud.   
   
 A weekend comes and goes, he knows, because he can hear the church bells blaring after Sunday Mass. Like that ever saved anyone.  
   
That’s when Bobby loses his cool. His jaw is set and it gives him a jowly look, and Sam wants to tell him that he didn’t love Dean, he didn’t, not if he can keep his shit together right now. But Sam’s managed to make it all this time without a word, so why ruin a perfect streak?  
   
Bobby looms over the bed, kicking the barely-touched plate from the kitchen out of his way, and tells Sam to roll his ass out of bed right this goddamn minute.  
   
“If you think I’m gonna play maid to your sorry ass any longer, boy, you’ve got another thing comin’. Now, we just lost one Winchester, and I ain’t losin’ another. You got to do something, eat something – hell, kill something for all I care, but if I don’t see your ass downstairs by lunchtime I’m smoking you out.”  
   
Sam doesn’t really acknowledge the advice, but he does think that that might be the first good idea Bobby’s had yet. There are plenty of things out there for him to kill.  
   
“But take a shower first, you’re stinkin’ up the joint like tuna fish in a trash can.”  
 

~*~

   
Castiel, the paper-pushing son of a bitch, can neither confirm nor deny Dean’s presence in Heaven. Bureaucratic, celestial asshat. Sam wants to take his red tape and shove it up his—  
   
No matter. The demons are happy to promise they’ve got Dean down under, screaming on a pike for every damned soul to enjoy. Which of course puts Sam on the war path, killing any and every demon that tries to explain that they can’t just _let_ Sam into Hell, you see, because there has to be a contract, a promise, and that’s when demons start to rethink their position. Because no one, not even Lucifer’s best and brightest, wants Sam Winchester cutting a swath through their homeland. So Sam gets his answer anyway.  
   
“And why should I believe you this time?” Sam asks the demon he’s got stuck in a (pathetically easy) devil’s trap, towering over the tiny girl it decided to wear like Sunday’s finest and doing his best to look intimidating. The heap of dead hell spawn behind him tops off the effect.  
   
“Because, if we ever catch him again, we’ll make you watch.”  
   
And that, Sam recognizes, is probably true. Torturing just one of the brothers hasn’t been good enough in Hell’s gnarled book for a long, long time; they’d likely aim for the set.   
   
So, okay, not in Hell then.  
   
Good. That’s good. Sam feels a twinge of guilt at his disappointment that Dean isn’t someplace he can yank him back from, that he’s not justified in wanting his brother back here right this damn minute, afterlife or not. But he stuffs it down behind the fury at being toyed with and his plans to wash the Impala this afternoon. Again.  
   
He kills that demon too, because what would it do to his reputation if they heard he was getting soft? Besides – Winchester. Obviously.  
   
Sam makes a pretty competent solo act, even if it does feel like typing out his will with only one hand. So what if he often grabs one more gun than he needs, or circles ‘round to the passenger side before he remembers the keys are in his pocket? It’s adjustment, that’s all, he’s adjusting, and it’s taking a little time. He just lost his brother, okay, his goddamn only family on this planet, so why do people keep _looking_ at him like that?  
 

~*~

   
It only takes a couple weeks before he gets the idea. His brother’s not gone. Or, at least, he doesn’t have to be. Sam knows exactly where he is. And, even better, he knows how to get there.  
   
Except, as much as he prayed before, he always thought the Bible was a sort of guideline. Up for interpretation, that kind of thing. But now that he’s seen how infuriatingly literal angels are, well, he’s thinking maybe he should follow that book to the letter. And the letter says no matter how bad he wants to get to Heaven, he can’t send himself there. So.  
   
Vampires. Vampires are easy. Not to kill, though that’s a breeze too, but to seduce.  
   
He feels like the cheap star of some trashy porno. Trashy neck porno. He’s sitting right next to one, who’s mouthing away at the lip of her beer bottle but never actually drinking, and Sam’s doing everything he can to make his neck look sexy, bitable and unprotected. Yawning, twisting his head to look at specs of dust behind him, and generally staring into space with his chin in the air.  
   
This chick, though, just will not budge. She’s making eyes at him, practically blowing the bottle and leaving blood red lipstick all down its neck, but she won’t make the first move. Sam’s finally about to introduce himself when a stocky man throws his hip against the bar between them.  
   
“Hey,” the guy says, and Sam can’t help but notice his freckles. They’re all over, making his pale skin look tanner than it probably is, and it strikes a chord of familiarity that only strengthens Sam’s resolve.  
   
“Excuse me,” Sam says, trying to look both firm but still innocent enough for the vamp to mark him as easy prey. “You’re blocking my view.”  
   
The dude grins, unphased. “You sure that’s what you’re lookin’ for?”  
   
Sam’s about to say no, to chalk this up to a wasted night and try again later, when he realizes how wide the guy is smiling. He’s got one of those unfortunate gumlines that’s entirely bare when he smiles, and Sam sees them. A neat little set of sheath holes, just waiting to birth fangs.  
   
“Umm,” Sam answers, now that he knows he’s staring his own death in the face.  
   
The guy leans forward, like he’s got a secret, and lays one hand casually on Sam’s forearm.  
   
 _Jesus Christ_ , he thinks, _this vamp thinks he’s flirting with me._ Apparently he has no gaydar. And really, the only thing that bothers him about this whole situation is that the vamp assumed he was gay. Sure, he’d planned on being dragged to his death by a voluptuous she-vamp, but this’ll do. So he nods, straightening up from the stool shakily, and lets the guy rest one cold hand in the small of his back.  
   
The chick behind him is staring at Sam like he’s just sprouted leaves, and curls her lip back in disgust.  
   
“Are you kidding?” she asks, before downing half her beer in one go and storming away.  
   
Okay, so, apparently he has neither gaydar nor vampdar. No time left to worry about it now.  
   
The car ride is awkward, because the vamp dude is still putting the moves on and Sam is tempted to pull down his jacket and yell, “Make with the biting, alright!” but he’s just gonna let the vamp bite him on his own time because he cannot – the Bible was clear on this, _cannot_ – ask for his own death.  
   
Except, oh God, what if the guy is hoping for sex first?  
   
As it is, Sam gives awkward smiles and turns down dark roads when he’s told to. The vamp doesn’t have a car because, Sam knows, there’s no point in burning gas when they can walk somewhere just as fast. Plus, victims feel safer when they have their own transportation, or so he’s read. And been tearfully told.  
   
He parks under a large sycamore tree by a steep, soggy tumble of a riverbank, just like he’s told, and tries to get back into neck-porn mode when the vamp unbuckles his seat belt. Sam’s looking away, letting his body sag against the door, and is just about to close his eyes when he hears:  
   
“What the fuck are you doing? _Run_ , Sammy!”  
   
His eyes snap open and he’s alert, sitting up and scrutinizing the dark shapes around the car for his brother.  
   
“Hey now,” the vamp says, “the fun part’s still coming,” but Sam can’t spare him the time to care.   
   
Because over the guy’s beefy shoulder, just barely lit in the moonlight, is his brother.  
   
“Dean?”  
   
“Angus, actually,” but Sam just hisses at him to shut up.  
   
That’s when the vamp gets pissed, but there is no way Sam’s about to become this leech’s slurpee when Dean is right freakin’ there. Sam scrambles, shoving the vamp’s chest with one hand and fumbling for the door handle with the other. When he catches it he falls, tumbling out of the car, but free is free and he’s fine with losing points for style.  
   
“Dean! Where are you?”  
   
“Here, Sammy. Where’s your knife?”  
   
Sam spots him through the darkened windows, head still illuminated by the frame of the front passenger’s door, and starts patting himself down. His knife, where’s his knife?  
   
He hadn’t brought it because he, he wanted to die, but now –  
   
“Duck!” And he does, because he’s been following Dean’s war cries all his life and now is no different.  
   
It takes a lot of dodging, mostly because Dean’s not helping – why isn’t he helping? – but Sam eventually wrestles his way into the back seat where he can grab for the spare machete.  
   
The vamp goes down easy, probably because he thought he was dealing with a helpless civilian and not a seasoned hunter, and his head isn’t even rolling through the dead leaves before Sam’s running around the car.  
   
“Dean? Where are you?” Sam yells, because he’s not there but then – _then_ – he is. The clouds shift or something because suddenly Dean’s in full view, completely illuminated by the moonlight, and Sam wishes it were daytime so he could show Dean the car, show him how well he took care of her, how everything is just like it was.  
   
Dean’s eyebrows are pinched and Sam knows he’s about to be chewed out, but there is no version of this where he could possibly care. Dean’s back, here, alive, and that’s all that matters. He’s reaching for Sam’s face, to look him over even as he berates him, and Sam’s reaching back, so beyond ready for that brotherly hug. He needs to grab his brother tight and know, once and for all, that he’s back, to apologize for letting him down, to be forgiven. Even the anticipation of that relief is blissful, and Sam lunges for it with his whole body.  
   
Instead, though, he stumbles. He isn’t caught by Dean’s steadying arms, chest smacking chest, his fingers don’t even catch leather, and when he looks up he’s alone. Again.  
   
“Sammy?”  
   
“Dean?” He flips around, feet sliding on the soggy leaves, and Dean’s still there, twisting around too and looking just as bewildered.  
   
It’s a cruel joke, and whoever or whatever is pulling it will be missing a ribcage once Sam finds them. He’d walk away right now, just get in the Impala and try not to fall apart like the cry baby Dean says he is. Said he is. Except… except the Dean-vision looks about ready to pop a gasket. He’s clutching at his plaid shirt with both hands and his eyes are so wide. Even if Sam can see through him – how could he ever think it was the moonlight? – it’s still Dean’s face, horrified like Sam hasn’t seen it since the Hellhounds were teething on his ankles, and there’s just no way Sam can walk away from it.  
   
The vision is reaching for him again and saying, in a perfect imitation of his brother’s tone and cadence, “Sammy? What happened to you?”  
   
Sam gasps so hard he chokes on his own spit. What is this thing, and why doesn’t it know? Sam should be the one asking questions.  
   
Is this the demons, just fucking with them because they can? Or the angels, and their childishly-belated payback? Is it a ghost, some revenant, that takes the form of loved ones? Or, could it be…  
   
It’s within reach now, and Sam slowly extends his arm out, unfurling his fingers to let them slip through the image. It’s like cool mist, a fog, but its intrinsic glow streaks between his fingertips like sunshine through a leafy canopy. His face is indistinct, the wells of his eyes and angle of his nose just barely dimmer, like shadows over a deep lake. So, definitely a spirit of some kind then. Which means…  
   
Okay, just for the sake of argument, Sam decides to go with it. Just until he’s proven wrong. Because what if it is Dean? What if Dean’s ghost came by to say hi and how’s tricks and Sam just kicked him to the curb like yesterday’s hero, insisting they weren’t brothers and totally fucking with Dean’s posthumous peace of mind and then Dean’s ghost is cursed to haunt this highway forever looking for the long lost baby brother who does love him back and— Sam breathes. It’s not him, it’s not, but if it were… even the thought of the guilt knots his stomach like a wrung-out dish towel, and he knows he has to try.  
   
“Dean?” he asks again, and it feels like that’s the only thing he’s said tonight. “How you doin’?”  
   
The Dean-thing is still trying to grab him, though, to touch him and reassure himself that Sam’s here, that they’re both here, and the inevitable failure is etched into his face. “What’s wrong with you? Are you okay?”  
   
Sam tries to put on his brave face, to remind himself that the sound of his brother’s fear is just an illusion, but it’s like watching someone cry. Even if you don’t know why, eventually you’re swallowing hard around the lump in your throat. So now, with that wide-eyed terror on a face he’s been following, watching, hanging his hopes on his whole life, he can’t avoid feeling its anguish.  
   
“It’s okay, Dean, really. I’m fine.” He puts one big hand on his chest. The ghost tries to cover his palm with his own, but it slips through to his ribs and Sam shivers. “What about you? Does it hurt?”  
   
“What hurt?”  
   
Again, Sam tries to choke it back. How do you tell your own brother you let him die? That he’s got a big gaping neck wound where the monster’s teeth dragged him fifty feet to the murky water and you were so immersed in your Latin it took you half that time to even notice.  
   
You don’t, that’s how. At least not yet. Because Sam can’t relive that night, can’t dredge up the glassy-eyed look on Dean’s face, letting the swamp just gurgle into his open mouth as the creature opened its jaws and he slid down into its muck-filled mouth. He won’t, not if this isn’t really his brother. Because it makes no sense that it would be, that Dean would be here, because he doesn’t think they’ve ever been to Hamilton, Indiana in their lives, and there’s nothing for him to haunt.  
   
So he says, “Tell me something only you would know.” It’s bullshit, it’s a parlor trick, but he just can’t think of anything else.  
   
Ghost-Dean looks, of all things, insulted, and it just rings so true that Sam feels guilty even putting him through this test, but he’s a fucking ghost for Christ’s sake. He’s made of thin air, Sam wouldn’t be the man he is if he didn’t follow a few precautions.  
   
“Please, it’s important.”  
   
“You had a crush on Laura Beekley in the fourth grade.”  
   
Sam shakes his head. Everyone in his and the mixed four/five class knew that.  
   
The ghost huffs, but thinks of another.  
   
“You put your french fries in ketchup, but sweet potato fries in ranch, you freak.”  
   
“Come on, anyone could know that.”  
   
“Yeah, but only I care enough to remember.”  
   
Sam shifts uneasily. He wants to let it go, but it’s just not the proof he’s looking for.  
   
“Okay, fine. When you were nine, I told you you were too big to sleep in our bed anymore. Except for that one time in Crawford County, when that spiky fuck lanced me through the chest. Then I couldn’t fall asleep ‘til you did.”  
   
God, that brings a different kind of hurt back to Sam’s chest. An old, healed-over wound, just like the scar above Dean’s heart, the one he’d tattooed over. Dean had been shivering madly, sick from venom and whining in his sleep, high pitched like a dog. Dad was out, looking to nab another spike to make the antidote, but nonetheless absent and no help at all. And, fuck, if nine had been too old then sixteen was downright forbidden, but he didn’t care. He’d just notched himself in right behind Dean, finally tall enough to be the big spoon, and fell asleep with Dean’s buzz cut tickling his nose.  
   
“But you were out, man. You were delirious. I heard you.”  
   
“No,” he shakes his head. “I was fakin’ sleep so you would quit asking me what you should do.”  
   
“Oh,” Sam mumbles, feeling kind of chastised for no good reason. “It was a stupid rule, anyway.”  
   
Ghost-Dean laughs once, softly. “Dude, I was fourteen. Puberty started popping up. Every morning, if you get my drift.”  
   
“Oh,” Sam says again. _Oh._ And actually, yeah, that makes sense. In fact, it’s blatantly obvious, now, with the clarity of hindsight and adulthood and his own memories of slamming the bathroom door and telling Dean to just _get out_.  
   
Dean’s still grinning, in a lopsided kind of way that would look embarrassed if this wasn’t Dean in front of him, who wore his sexuality like a badge of honor.  
   
Dean. Even as he’s reaching for him, Sam’s trying to brush the tears out of his eyelashes, because Dean doesn’t know, won’t understand, and Sam knows better than to get all weepy in front of his big brother anyway. Or his ghost.  
   
He doesn’t make contact, though, doesn’t even try, because talk about an exercise in futility. And it hits home, then, that while Dean is here, he isn’t back. Not really.  
   
“Come on, Sammy. Let’s hit the road.”  
   
Sam’s about to say that he doesn’t think they can, that Dean may not be able to go far, but instead he just nods. They’ll cross that bridge when they get to it. Hell, cross it, salt it, burn it. Whatever it takes.  
   
Sam buries the headless body under a pile of leaves and top soil between the buckled-up roots of a large tree while Dean waits by the car. When Sam’s done, he looks up to see Dean already in the passenger seat, elbow hanging out of the window – no, _through_ the window – like it’s a hot summer day.  
   
He fakes a smile even as his stomach drops.  
 

~*~

   
Dean’s shimmery presence lasts the entire drive back to the Sleepy Plains Motel and needless to say, Sam is shocked. Wary, even. But whatever kind of gift horse this is he promises to never, ever, check its teeth.  
   
It isn’t until Sam’s pushing the Impala’s trunk closed, and yelling “Come on,” over his shoulder, that things start to make a little more sense.  
   
Dean follows him, swaggering just a little, and even blinking slowly with that post-kill exhaustion Sam recognizes so easily. He’s got the prairie dog key ring in his hand, wondering if ghosts even sleep, knowing that they don’t, but glad he accidentally got two beds anyway. And that’s when Dean disappears. Just like any other spirit he flickers, hologram technology that’s just not worthy of the Enterprise yet, and then he’s sitting back in the car, bewildered.  
   
“What the hell!”  
   
Sam’s face contorts into a deep grimace, because he should have known. It just makes so much sense. It’s not Dean’s body that kept him here, since that was freakin’ absorbed into the swamp monster, it’s his things. His prized possessions. Sam flips through his mental catalogue of the car, from the tapes to the crease-worn maps with Dean’s scratchy notes to the cache of weapons in the trunk.  
   
One by one, Sam brings everything from the car into the cramped motel room, making messy piles by the out-of-place Mojave curtains. It’s like a minefield of memories, not knowing which one will be the last one. Not that he’ll do anything with the knowledge, not necessarily. But it’d be good to know. Just… yeah. Just to know.  
   
And maybe he leaves Dean’s favorite pearl-handled gun ‘til last,  maybe he moves the old leather jacket to the front seat instead of carrying it in, because it belongs with Dean now that he’s back. Sam keeps waiting for Dean to follow one armful into the room, or to just flicker over to the lone chair, but he doesn’t. Not even when he carries their journals, Dad’s and Dean’s, in with a funeral march all of their own. Not the spit from licking his fingers as he flipped the pages, then. Sam is, maybe, audibly grateful.  
   
He does the weapons towards the end, just ‘cause of what a bitch they are to carry, but even that doesn’t do the trick. And that’s when Sam’s given one more piece to the puzzle.  
   
Of course. Dean’s most prized possession isn’t squirreled away in the glove compartment, it’s the whole damn thing. His last remaining gift from Dad, the only thing that he’s never been without. The Impala herself.  
   
And Sam doesn’t give a fuck what Bobby or Dad or anyone else would say, he is not burning Dean’s baby. Besides, it’s not like Dean’s ghost is malevolent or anything.  
   
He gathers up his machete, Dean’s favorite sawed-off and some salt rounds, and all the blankets and pillows from the unkempt bed. Dean asks him what the fuck he’s doing as he opens the car door with his pinky, trying to balance his supplies in one precarious heap, but Sam just tells him to slide over. He’ll bring the rest of the shit back tomorrow, but for now his arms are tired and he’s not going to spend one more night without Dean if he doesn’t have to.  
   
Sam punches his impromptu bed until it looks at least somewhat comfortable, and shrugs all the blankets up to his neck. The car has long since lost the engine’s warmth and Dean’s sure to keep the vinyl ice-box frosty all night.  
   
“You goin’ for a Darwin Award here, man?”  
   
“Shut up, Dean.”  
   
Unexpectedly, Dean does, and Sam opens his eyes in alarm. Dean’s still sitting there, though, shifting around in the driver’s seat like getting comfortable makes any difference.  
   
“Just, don’t leave, alright?”  
   
“What, like I got shit to do?”  
 

~*~

   
It’s not quite as Arcticly chilly in the morning, and Sam enjoys a wide swatch of sun against his cheek before he realizes that means Dean’s gone. He calls out for him anyway, just in case the sun streaking across the leather seats renders him translucent, but he’s only answered with birdsong and the rumbling of tires up on the highway.  
   
By the time he’s gotten coffee, Sam’s wondering if it was just a dream, even if he does have to lug all that shit back to the trunk. In the thin, crisp light of the afternoon he convinces himself it was just a hallucination. Some kind of freaky mind-trip telling himself that he didn’t want to die, not really, so he shakes it off and resolves never to tell anyone. “One’s dead and the other one’s crazy” just rolls off the tongue a bit too easy.  
   
So he switches rooms to a single, and falls asleep that night contemplating the cruel nature of hope.  
   
After that, it’s back to the killing. If even his subconscious won’t let him off himself, hunting’s pretty much all he’s got left and, besides, he still has a lot of catching up to do where Dean’s concerned.  A lot to put right, to make up for.  
 

~*~

   
This time it’s a demon, and the girl it chose to suit up in can’t be older than fifteen, but it’s strangling him with the pressure of the ocean’s depths anyway. It was waiting for him in the motel parking lot which means that, damnit, he’ll have to move again. He tries to get loose, to get a nice smack of the .45 to its head, but it turns out it only needs one hand to crush his windpipe because the other grips his wrist to the wall until his fingers spasm and drop the gun.  
   
It looks like he’s struggling, but really he’s waiting for his next brilliant idea and it’s just taking its sweet ol’ time showing up. He’s gasping now, having long since given up on death threats when he needs that oxygen for himself, so it’s with complete shock that he finally pulls cool, blessed air back into his lungs. The hand falls away from his throat like a dead fly off a wire, and Sam’s left with the sight of a milky, translucent Dean choke-holding a puff of smoke.  
   
So… not a hallucination, then. Or a massively recurring one.  
   
He feels useless, watching dumbly as two intangible beings wrestle it out, but what can he really offer? He’s got the knife, but the chance that it could banish Dean along with the demon is just too big a risk.  
   
“You alright there, Sammy?”  
   
When Sam nods, one hand to his throat, Dean lets the demon hurl itself back into the body, and Sam’s ready with a knife across its throat before it even shudders in its first inhuman breath.  
   
Then Dean’s rushing Sam, arms poised for the standard Winchester family look-over, except he can’t. Not now, not ever, and instead he slips straight through Sam and into the tacky room behind him.  
   
Sam wonders if he’ll ever get used to the chills.  
   
Dean’s not in the room, but Sam knows better than to expect it and after he drags the discarded body across the threshold of room 6, he heads back to the car.  
   
Dean’s in a mood, no mistaking, but it’s almost just more proof that it really is Dean. Pissed, avoidant, drumming out a silent pattern on the steering wheel and pretending nothing’s wrong. Sam would just ignore it, gladly, until Dean did something so reckless that Sam had to call him on it except… What is Sam supposed to do? Sit on him? Politely ask him to move over because he’s not exactly corporeal at the moment and they have driving laws about that kind of thing?  
   
When Sam opens the passenger door Dean, honest to god, holds out his hand and says, “Keys. Gimme.”  
   
“Dean.”  
   
The hand is persistent. “Seriously, we don’t have time for this crap. Gimme the keys.”  
   
Sam considers handing them over, just to see them drop right through his palm. “Dean.”  
   
Yeah, _mood_ might be an understatement, because that’s as much as Dean can take. He smacks his hand noiselessly against the horn before his shoulders sag, suddenly the picture of defeat.  
   
“Damnit, Sammy,” he says, rolling his chin all the way down against his chest, “you and your damn talking.”  
   
Sam considers his silence to be both pointed and ironic, but of all the things that are wrong with this picture, he’s not actually sure which Dean’s so bothered over. It takes a solid three minutes under Sam’s stare, but Dean eventually works himself up to it on his own and turns, barely, to stare back.  
   
“I, uh,” he starts, and drags a hand down his face. “I think we should head to Bobby’s.”  
   
Sam files that under ‘not a snowball’s chance’, and nods.  
   
“I’m thinkin’, maybe, I caught some hoodoo back in Indiana.”  
   
“What sort of hoodoo?”  
   
Dean looks away; he never could own up to those crippling weaknesses like _being human_ and _needing help._ “Been losing time.”  
   
Sam reaches for him, but stops himself in time, poised over the middle seat. “Dean, it’s not—”  
   
“Damnit, Sammy. You saw how close you came. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’ve been, but even if it turns out I’m just sitting on my thumbs all day, it still means I’m not around when you get yourself in trouble.”  
   
He bristles, because he does not _get himself—_ That’s not the point.  
   
Sam’s never met a ghost that isn’t trying to turn someone’s lips blue, but he’s never met a revenant so lucid either. Sam doesn’t actually have a clue what Dean is. But despite the link to the Impala, he’s starting to lean towards some form of revenant. Because, again, the not-trying-to-kill-people thing – but that means once Dean knows… once he accepts that he’s really…  
   
The guilt tastes sour in the back of his throat. Revenants are in agony. Hell, ghosts are too, and to purposely trap his brother’s spirit on earth would be a new level of unholy. Bobby would have his hide and Dad, God, Dad would resurrect him just to skin him again.  
   
He knows what he has to do. But the chance to explain, to apologize; people had killed for less. And here was his chance, shifting uncomfortably and talking about looking after him. The thought stings his eyes and dredges up the spiral of thoughts that had left him bed ridden at Bobby’s for so very long.  
   
When he looks up, Dean’s even blurrier than usual, and he doesn’t even care that his eyelashes are clumping when he finally says the two words that have plagued him since the swamp.  
   
“I’m sorry. Dean, I’m so sorry, I should’ve known, I should’ve looked up and seen and caught you and if I could go back, I would. I would but—”  
   
“Hey,” Dean says, his hand reaching out toward Sam, for Sam. Through Sam, but he doesn’t notice.  “Hey. We’ll fix it, okay? Just hold up.”  
   
And Sam does because after one look at Dean’s face, his throat’s too tight to form vowels. Dean’s got that face on again, the forgot-to-pretend face and it’s all earnest and worried and so very big-brother. Sam doesn’t know how he can say his brother is dead when there’s still someone on this earth who looks at him like _that._  
   
Dean reaches for him again, but Sam pulls back. He just wants to pretend, just for a minute, but the icy tendrils left by Dean’s touch make it hard to ignore the fact that Dean’s words have no bearing on reality, that underneath the illusion of warmth they’re empty, just like the seat Dean’s sitting in.  
   
“We’ll take care of it, Sammy. You just gotta tell me what _it_ is, alright?”  
   
Sam shakes his head, looks away, but even as he does he feels the tears fling from his cheeks. He looks up instead, trying to let them well, trapped, on his lower eyelid, so he doesn’t make any more of a scene than he has to. He can see Dean sigh out of the corner of his eye, then swear quietly, and Sam knows the signs. Dean’s reached the end of his touchy-feely rope, is so far out of his element he’ll need to change tactics soon, and if Sam doesn’t pull himself together fast he’ll be on the cruel end of some rather emasculating jokes. For a moment Sam almost wants to laugh, because the thing keeping him from mourning Dean’s death properly is Dean himself, and his same old tricks.  
   
Sure enough, Dean makes a show of settling himself into the driver’s seat, rolling his neck even though the typical crack is inaudible, and flexing his fingers around the wheel. “Fine,” he says, “we can make a few more hours before we gotta bunk down again.”  
   
Sam sniffs, oddly more relieved than slighted, because _yup_ – same old. Which is why he’s too shocked by Dean’s next sentence to keep him from reaching for the radio.  
   
“You just let me know when you’re ready for the show and tell bit. Then we’ll get on it.”

 

 

And sure, that’s more understanding than Sam was expecting, more head-on confrontation than Sam really thought he was capable of, but it doesn’t matter right now because Dean’s flicked the radio on.  
   
In the cold-engine, un-revved, keys-in-Sam’s-pocket Impala, Dean just turned the radio on. Without even touching the dial. One of Zep’s mellower ballads starts seeping into the car, but Sam knows for a fact that his Bob Dylan tape’s sitting in the deck even as this plays.  
   
Dean reaches for the gearshift next, and Sam’s a little afraid it won’t work, but mostly he’s afraid it will. He shouldn’t let his dead brother drive, but he can’t – absolutely can’t – head to Bobby’s like Dean’s time spent MIA is just another case to solve. Even if he could keep his shit together on the drive up, let Dean think things will be _just fine_ until they reach the junkyard, Sam has a feeling Bobby’s level of un-fine would show up on the Richter scale.  
   
Much as Dean wants to try, he can’t help Sam. Or himself. It’s a draining thought, that their time of _no happy ending_ has come so soon – Dean’s dead and there are no take-backs – but if he owes Dean anything it’s the chance to let him move on.  
   
His mouth is dry no matter how much he tries to swallow, tongue swollen and gritty, but he still manages to stop Dean before the fingers curling through the gearstick try to shift into drive.  
   
“What do you remember?”  
   
Dean stops immediately, more eager to talk than Sam’s ever seen him, but he schools his face into a purposeful smirk to say, “’sides you getting your ass beat by a girl?”  
   
But Sam can’t even muster a smile, not even his backup humoring attempt. “Yeah. Besides that.”  
   
“Oh, I dunno.” He rubs one hand along the back of his neck. “Just that swamp… thing. Backin’ it up against the river.”  
   
“And then what?”  
   
“I, uh.” Dean looks away, then turns back with a waggling eyebrow. “Slashed ‘im up pretty good, didn’t I?”  
   
But again, it’s so not funny, Sam can’t even pretend. He has one more chance, one last chance before Dean’ll probably poof like a pumpkin carriage at midnight, ferried to another life by the self-actualization. Or, worse, realize the anger that’s kept him here and see for himself just how much damage a haunted Impala can do.  
   
So he says it one last time. “I’m sorry.”  
   
“Hey.”  
   
The tears are back in full force, raining down on his clasped hands and the Impala’s vinyl but he doesn’t care. “He just kept regenerating—”  
   
“I thought we just did this bit.”  
   
“And I kept working on the Latin, that fucking chanting—”  
   
“It’s gonna be okay, Sammy.”  
   
“You died, Dean! I let you die.”  
   
And when that, finally, shuts Dean up, Sam has to jerk away.  
   
“Sammy.” Dean’s voice is low, still none of the violence or disgust Sam deserves, so he ignores it. “Hey.”  
   
Sam’s shoulders are shaking but suddenly they’re shivering too, which means Dean’s trying to offer some fucked up form of comfort, but Sam just curls his face down into his hands and cries harder. He can’t let his brother console him when Sam’s the one who delivered him to death. He just wants to grieve, he just wants to mourn in private – fuck. He just wants forgiveness.  
   
“What did you do?”  
   
“Nothing,” he promises into his hands.  
   
“Come on, Sammy. Didn’t we already learn this the hard way? You salt and burn. Always salt and burn.” And when Sam doesn’t respond, he adds, “No more deals.”  
   
“I didn’t,” he swears, looking up for the first time. Looking at Dean’s glow in the approaching twilight’s like staring at a street lamp through a rain-streaked windshield, distorting itself and everything around it, and he only has the cues in Dean’s voice to go by. “I made sure you weren’t in Hell – I _made sure_ – and I thought you were upstairs until… I burned everything I could find, Dean.”  
   
“Then how come I’m still here, Sammy? How come I can—” He jams a hand at the steering wheel, aiming straight for the horn in a loud declaration of how very present he is, and Sam feels the sick burn of anticipation and pity as Dean’s hand slams right through it.  
   
Sam rubs at his eyes furiously, squinting through the wetness. If there was ever a time he needed to see Dean’s reaction, it’s now, but Dean isn’t looking up yet. He’s staring, gaping, at his hand through the steering column. He pulls it out slowly, reverently, and holds it up against the window, wiggling his fingers. Sam watches his hand disappear when it lines up with the sight of the moon, and when Dean looks back at him it’s finally with the horror Sam’s been expecting.  
   
“I’m—”  
   
 _Glowing? Incorporeal? The aftermath of a horrible, bloody death and it’s all your fault, Sam?_  
   
Dean’s voice crashes around a whisper, like his dead mouth can’t form the right syllables anymore. “I’m haunting you?”  
   
Sam shakes his head, eyes never leaving his brother. “The Impala.”  
   
And because Dean’s dead, glowing, and understandably a little fucked in the head, that brings a smile like none Sam’s seen since Dean was downgraded from life in Technicolor. His eyes widen and his teeth show in a translucent grin. His head and shoulders even seem to shine more, casting a bright, ethereal shadow on Sam’s side of the car that highlights each button and knob on the car’s console in sharp relief.  
   
“The Impala?”  
   
Sam nods, a little wary.  
   
“Course I’m haunting her. Aren’t I, baby?” He pets the dashboard like it’s some kind of loyal puppy, following him to the afterlife and back, and Sam’s so struck by the absurdity of it that he forgets his guilt enough to roll his eyes.

 

“Of course you are.”  
   
“Hey Sammy, you think I can…” He closes his eyes, and if Sam had to label that look he’d file it under constipated, but within a few seconds the dome light blinks on, pushing out an arc of pale yellow that’s cut into and overpowered by Dean’s own luminescence.  
   
“Dude,” Dean yells, mouth hanging open in a blatant _Did you see that?_ but Sam just rolls his eyes again.  
   
“That’s nothin’, man. You already turned on the stereo.”  
   
Dean’s eyes show surprise, flicking to the console to see the one dim light of the radio tuner, but his voice is cocky-smooth, Dean all the way through. “Sure did. And you know what else I can do?”  
   
Sam has no idea. Dean has no idea – he’s bullshitting at the top of his game – but Sam’s ready to sit back and watch until Dean makes a claim he can’t swagger through.  
   
Dean closes his eyes and slowly urges the heat vents to flood warm, dry air into the cabin. It’s a relief Sam didn’t even know he needed, respite from Dean’s frozen shadow, and he settles back against the vinyl, contented. Dean hasn’t stopped concentrating though, just reached a hand toward the dashboard again and leaned forward. Within a few moments he’s not just leaning, but hovering, still sitting but floating slowly forward until his chest is pressed up against the wheel and Sam’s attention is rapt. This is a new one.  
   
All it takes is a blink and Dean’s gone. Sam calls out, unnerved and alone, but before he can work up to a full-scale panic the car rumbles beneath him. The headlights flick on, highlighting the door of #6, _one queen, no smoking,_ _hot water don’t last more’n ten minutes, so don’t push it._ Then all the lights pop on, dashboard, console, door lights and with a final revving sound Sam hears the engine turn over, feels the steady thrum of the seat beneath him, vibrating against the keys in his jeans pocket.  
   
Sam poises himself at the ready, debating slipping into the driver’s seat to wrestle control back from Dean, when his head pops back into the car. Just his head, straight through the dash.  
   
“This is so cool. I can’t wait to take her out for a spin.”  
   
“You’re not driving, Dean.”  
   
“Course I am. It’s my car.”  
   
“You’re dead.” And Sam can’t believe he just said that, aloud and dry-eyed, but it’s still a valid freaking point.  
   
“And this is the car I’m haunting. I’m supposed to drive it.”  
   
“Let’s hold off on possessing two tons of metal and gasoline just yet, alright?”  
   
Now it’s Dean’s turn to roll his eyes, unimpressed and pouting in that way that uses just his eyes, but he relents. Sam’s surprised he caved so fast, maybe too fast, but he only hesitates a moment when Dean says, “Scoot your ass over, Sasquatch. We’ll take turns.”  
   
It isn’t until Sam puts the keys in the ignition, tries to turn on a car that’s already running, that he realizes how surreal their conversation had become. How unexpectedly… easy. He would have bet money that Dean’s reaction, however he found out, would be laden with anger and blame and not a small dose of yelling. Instead he looks almost content, his feet up on the dash like he never got to do because Sam’s turns driving were a monthly affair, if that.  
   
“Hey, Sammy. You know what this means?”  
   
“What?”  
   
“Don’t gotta worry ‘bout the price of gas anymore.” Dean looks pleased – no, thrilled – over this idea, and Sam just shakes his head. Surreal.  
   
“We never worried about it before, either.”  
   
Dean scoffs, unperturbed.  
   
Sam allows himself a smile as he pulls onto the highway, heading in any direction that’s not South Dakota. 

 

~  ****

~*~  
   
 **2010**  
   
~*~

“Zep Four,” Sam calls, propping his elbow up through the open window. He has to yell to hear himself over the sound of the engine and the summer wind rushing in. He doesn’t know if the same goes for Dean, but he raises his voice all the same. “Too easy, gimme another.”  
   
The tuner in the dash blinks slowly, flipping through static and long distance stations like every other possessed radio Sam’s ever heard. Dean hasn’t quite figured out how to dial straight to the song he wants, but knowing Dean that’ll change soon enough. Three months under his belt and he’s already faster.  
   
“Your only station for soft rock, less talk— -mantha, who requested some Beatles— haven’t had that spirit here since—”  
   
The crooning dissolves into white noise for just a moment before a faint intro by some 80s hair band spools up, coming in soft and then perfectly clear. Sam waits, has to think about it and is hoping the chorus will tip him off before Dean times him out, but there’s no such luck.  
   
“Aww, Sammy. You’re losin’ your touch,” Dean says, from wherever he’s currently enjoying the ride. Sam asked once, and Dean had said he preferred the carburetor most of the time.  
   
“What, not the fuel injector?” he’d taunted, but the disgruntled shock and ‘ _of course not’_ had taught Sam better than to try and understand.  
   
“I know it’s Def Leppard,” Sam calls into the dash. “Gimme another verse.”  
   
“No can do, Sammy. Another point for me.”  
   
“We never even had that one on tape.”  
   
“Them’s the breaks,” Dean says, and the car fills up with static again.  
   
The next song is unexpected, odd tinkling and talking that sounds like it could be ghost radio again before the guitar jumps in, and Sam knows this song. _Knows_ it.  
   
“Dean, this is Radiohead.”  
   
“Nope, the album’s called—”  
   
“I know the album, Dean. You sure you didn’t get some wires crossed? You never let me play this in the car.”  
   
There’s a silence, rumbly and taut, but if Dean can make a streamlined piece of metal shrug that’s exactly what Sam thinks he’s doing. Sam just blinks and shakes his head. He remembers being twelve, checking in every muggy gas station for the day The Bends finally made it to the podunk towns they visited, and then stealing off into the bathroom to get one good listen in before Dean started making fun of him. He’d blast Bad Company from the car, drowning out the noise from the foamy headphones he and Sam shared, until there was no point trying to listen at all. It was only when Dad was on a hunt, the car gone and Dean less pushy, that Sam got to lay on his bed and listen to his own music.  
   
The mechanical click of the stereo shutting off brings Sam back to the here and now, and then Dean says, “Sammy?”  
   
“Could we leave it on? Just, I mean, just for the rest of the song?”  
   
“Sure thing, kiddo. But I’m up, two-one.”  
   
“What? I got two of ‘em.”  
   
“Yeah, but you never actually said The Bends.”  
   
And now Sam’s pretty sure Dean’s giving the Impala a smirk. He scoffs, ready to protest, but then the whole album starts over from the beginning, and Sam’s content to just settle back and listen. Besides, if there’s one thing Sam’s learned from this game, it’s that Dean never actually keeps score. Which is… weird.

~*~

   
Dean’s stuck in the parking lot, because the Lazy Pines motel apparently has a busy season, and Sam had to park in the neighboring lot of an old carriage house. Dean’s gotten just close enough that Sam can see him through the open door, and he’s scowling at a Prius parked haphazardly across two spots.  
   
“This plan sucks, Sammy.”  
   
Sam gives one last tug on the zipper of his duffel and swings it over his shoulder. “Why?”  
   
“Well, for starters, I was being optimistic when I called it a plan.”  
   
“How is it not a plan? Find her remains, add salt and bake at 350. Same as always.”  
   
“How bout the fact that she was adopted? Who knows what her birth parents kept. Hair, dolls, dirty diapers.”  
   
Sam raises an eyebrow as he catches up to Dean, both turning to head towards the car.  
   
“Whatever, you know what I mean.”  
   
“Uh huh,” Sam says noncommittally, biting down a smile so Dean won’t know he’s goading him on just yet.   
   
“I just don’t like the idea of you ghost-proofing yourself for a hunt. We’re not on the same side of the salt anymore.”  
   
“It’s just a contingency plan, Dean. Besides, don’t you see how this gives us the advantage? If I get stuck behind a salt line – which I won’t – you can still torch the remains.”  
   
“How?” Dean demands, slouching into the passenger’s seat before Sam can even reach over to unlock the door. “With all that salt I’m gonna have?”  
   
“You can still torch ‘em. How many times have ghosts tried to light us on fire?”  
   
“Only the ones who died in a fire in the first place.” Dean’s hand flicks through the air in a way that drives it in and out of view in the strong sunlight, and Sam’s eyes keep trying to track it until Dean says, “Come on, Sammy, think.”  
   
“I am thinking.” Truth is, they don’t exactly know how Dean will match up against other ghosts. Sam had maybe been, possibly, avoiding that. Just a little. It’s not that Sam thinks Dean would get any ideas, or that he’d be more susceptible to alternative haunting attitudes. Just that… yeah. It hit a little close to home these days. But Bobby had called this one in and Sam had run out of excuses. It was a friend of a mom of a hunter, etc. etc., and Sam had been forced to say yes.  
   
“You got a better idea?” Sam asks. “Spill it.”  
   
Dean doesn’t answer, face wooden, and Sam gives up. Dean’s been pushy as hell about their hunts lately, always calling things out as too risky or badly planned, and Sam just doesn’t know how to answer.  
   
Once upon a time, the Winchesters were a well oiled machine. Three parts or two, shiny-new or worn down and pissed off, they knew how they ran. They _worked._ Dad made demands, they fought, and then shit got done. Dean wanted to gank something reckless, they fought, and then shit got done. Sam wanted to settle down, slow down, but still. Same old song, and it only had the one verse.  
   
Sam’s never been on this end of the fight before. He doesn’t have twenty years of rationalizing why this Dean acts _this_ way, says _these_ things, and his lines don’t come so easy anymore. This is not the brotherly fight he can have with his eyes closed.  
   
Since when is Dean gun-shy? Cautious, sure. Taking the front line so Sam could fall back? Sure. Even before– even last year. _Even at the swamp,_ Sam thinks, but he squashes that thought down. Because now, no amount of planning seems to satisfy Dean. Hell, if being invisible and wielding 2,000 pounds of metal doesn’t give Dean the advantage, he doesn’t know what will. And still, Dean wants them to hang back.  
   
Sam jams the keys in the ignition, ready to move on even if they have to argue, but the sharp twist of his wrist doesn’t spark a growl from the engine the way it should. He turns the key again, listening to the engine click, sputter and die, before dropping his hand and looking at Dean, annoyance fresh and clear on his face.  
   
“That is not a better idea.”  
   
Dean huffs, but the car comes to life.  
   
When they pull up outside Sunny Day Retirement Center, Sam idles by the curb. This wasn’t a hard one to trace, neglectful orderlies choking on their own tongues at the hands of one Melinda P. Henderson, 1916-1995, and given how deserted the whole neighborhood east of the tracks is, it’s about as easy as a suburban hunt can get. She was even cremated, so they get to skip the grave-desecration part.  
   
The summer sun has kept the sky a hazy pink and orange well into the evening, and Sam can still read the name of the Home. The sign is decrepit, paint cracked and painfully neglected, but even if it were fresh Sam thinks he still wouldn’t have gotten a good vibe. The logo has an art deco feel, a rudimentary sun with rays in two colors – burnt orange and brown – and Sam wonders where the yellow went. Then he wonders what it’d be like to have a room in there. How much of their lives they had to dump to move into a single room, and whether or not they got to keep their car nearby.  
   
Finally, Sam asks, “Are we going in together?”  
   
Dean materializes out of the dash. “You bet your ass we are. Winchesters don’t wait in the car.”  
   
Sam almost laughs. Apparently, Dean’s mood has rebounded quickly, and Sam’s more than happy to go with it. That excuse had held very little weight against Dad and Dean back when Sam was trying to use it, back when the best thing he could find on the radio was Sting and the Police, but somewhere in the past five years it had become a suitable battle cry.  
   
“Alright. Mrs. Henderson’s old room should be right along that wall, so my best guess is she hid something in the wall or under the mattress.”  
   
Dean nods. “Got it. Let’s roll.”

~*~

   
As it turns out, Mrs. Henderson didn’t hide jack shit in the wall. Or under the mattress, or in the sink pipes, though the hairball Sam found in there had to have at least three people’s DNA tangled in it. Sam’s still poking around hopefully, looking for loose floorboards, but Dean’s just sprawled out on the bare mattress.  
   
“There’s nothing here, dude. Let’s go.”  
   
“We can’t know for sure without the EMF. Maybe I should check the closet.”  
   
They had experimented with that, Dean trying to will himself off the supernatural spectrum so Sam could use the EMF meter faithfully, but he might as well have been trying to resurrect himself with wishing wells and fortune cookies.  
   
“Yeah, but.”  
   
Sam turns, letting his spine snap crackle and pop as he stands up. “But?”  
   
Dean looks wary, almost confused even. “I don’t feel anything.”  
   
Sam smirks, slapping a hand across his heart. “Words hurt, Dean.”  
   
Dean rolls his eyes, but he sits himself up and his smile is fond. “Shut up, Sammy. I mean, shouldn’t I have some spidey sense going off?” His hands pat his own chest, awkward without a weapon to hold.  
   
“I don’t know. What, you have some sort of ghost-sonar?” That could come in handy.  
   
“No.” Dean drums his fingers along his knee. “Just that generic oh shit feeling, right? Like that wolf we just took out. Or the vamps in Missouri. And Indiana.”  
   
“I don’t know, man. I mean, that happens on every hunt.”  
   
But Dean shakes his head, sits up even straighter. “No. I mean, before. I feel it beforehand.”  
   
“Oh.” Sam blinks hard, trying to take in that new information. “So, like actual spidey sense.”  
   
“I guess so. Yeah.”  
   
Sam, actually, thinks that’s pretty fucking cool. His brother did always want to be a super hero when he grew up, and now— well. Posthumous or not, that gives Dean some pretty awesome bragging rights, even if this Dean isn’t so into cashing those in anymore.  
   
“Dean, why didn’t you tell me?”  
   
“I did. Usually in the form of _Run_ , _Sammy!_ ”  
   
Sam grins, and promptly abandons his search of the vacant room. “Yeah, alright. Let’s head to the dining room.”  
   
Which is all well and good, as far as plans go, until Mrs. Henderson herself catches wind of it. She’s faintly illuminated in the hallway, that subtly flickering glow that Sam was oddly starting to associate with safety, and he shakes his head to snap that thought away. He can’t let six months of conditioning replace twenty seven years of instinct.  
   
Sam lifts his sawed-off, leveling it with one hand and inching a finger under his collar with the other. It’s stuffy in the abandoned Home, more so now that they’ve been drawn away from any windows, and Sam takes a slow, turbulent breath.  
   
The ghost just stands calmly, but with a wicked glint to her smile as she eyes him. He primes the gun so he can shoot with just one hand, the other still pulling at the neck of his t-shirt, and waits for the ghost to make her first move. It’s a slow reaction, her gaze drifting as if by accident to Dean five steps behind his brother, but once she spots him she’s all wails and fury. In a flicker she’s closer, spilling into all of Sam’s vision and pressing one unyielding hand up against his throat.  
   
Her mouth is open in a shrill, unending scream, and as her fingers start to close around his windpipe, she cries, “Get your own!” Her voice is inhuman, too high and grating to be natural, and the rational part of Sam – the part not struggling for breath – wonders why Dean still sounds normal. Or, possibly, if it’s just a matter of time.  
   
Her grip is a vice, and Sam’s chest burns with the need for oxygen. It’s not just the breath being choked from him, it’s his lungs too – the feeling that even if he could open his throat for a breath it would do no good. Wind whips through the narrow hallway, tousling Sam’s hair to slap at his face but leaving the two ghosts untouched.  
   
 “Get your hands off him!” Dean yells, and then he’s not behind him but looming over the ghost instead. Without an instant’s pause he swings at her head, but with no weapon to speak of his fist just glides right through her, in her but not making contact. It looks, more like a double exposure of an old photograph than the wispy, smoke-like consistency Sam’s used to with iron, or salt rounds.  
   
Sam wheezes, scrabbling to get his gun level again, and it’s not so much an aim as it is a desperate shot, but he manages to get a load of salt to graze her side. Dean’s right behind her though, and when it catches him full in the gut he’s gone like the trail of smoke from an untended cigarette. The old woman’s ghost sputters, giving Sam just enough of a moment to sustain himself with another breath, and then she’s back with an even stronger grip.  
   
It takes Dean a full thirty seconds to come back, and Sam’s starting to give up keeping his eyes open, but he hears the familiar, “Son of a bitch!” He doesn’t see how, but within seconds his throat is blessedly unpinned, and he falls to his knees. Air is no easier to take in now, though, and instead of taking oxygen in he can feel wetness coming out, cool water rattling in his lungs and dripping painfully from his nose and mouth.  
   
He realizes, belatedly, that he’s been choking on water all this time, slowly building up in his lungs even before the ghost had touched him, and he was going to die drowning in tap water, just like the ghost had during her routine breakfast.  
   
“Dean!” he tries, but nothing makes it past the liquid in his throat, drowning him where he sits, and all he can manage is a weak thump of his fists against the floorboards. It’s enough, though, garnering Dean’s attention and Sam manages to look up through blurry vision when he yells out.  
   
“Sammy! Run!”  
   
He can’t, though, can barely move, and it hardly registers that Dean’s still fighting, one forearm under the old woman’s throat. She’s thrashing, kicking back viciously, and he can see Dean wince when she lands a solid blow. Both milky white as they are, so very much the _same_ , it looks like Dean’s just attacked an old woman.  
   
The drowning stops abruptly, and then Dean’s in his face, hands whisking over him with just the suggestion of touch.  
   
“Sammy? You with me?”  
   
His head jostles in an attempt to nod.  
   
“Follow me.”  
   
He waits for Sam to stand, more difficult than it usually is, and then heads into the nearest room. As soon as Sam’s by his side, he surges forward, through the solid plaster and plywood of the wall, and is gone.  
   
Sam curses silently, confused and alone, and he moves back out into the hall. The ghost is back – the one trying to kill him, not the one he’s hoping to see – and he stumbles as upright as he can toward the north end, where he hopes there’s an actual door.  
   
Dean catches up with him halfway there, saying, “Dammit, Sammy, I said follow me.”  
   
He’s panting, still in pain with each breath, but says, “I couldn’t get out that way.”  
   
“You should’ve just tried. It worked fine.” And Sam can’t deal with that faulty logic right now.  
   
“I’m not dead, Dean.”  
   
“’Course you’re not, Sammy. You’re fine. We’re getting out—”  
   
“Door!” Sam manages. “I need a door!”  
   
And then Dean’s on it, searching ahead even as Mrs. Henderson closes in on their trail.  
   
“Here, Sammy!” Dean calls from an alcove further up, and Sam hopes like hell that it’s a door both ghosts and humans can pass through.  
   
Thankfully, Dean’s pretty good with following direct requests, and they tumble out into the open night air. Dean’s gone, again, but Sam’s learning to get used to that. Instead of at his side, Dean comes running around the side of the building from the front, stopping before he reaches his maximum distance from the car like it’s an invisible electric fence..  
   
“Come on, Sammy.” He pinwheels an arm in the air, urging him on faster, and then flickers back to the car as Sam sprints there.  
   
Sam sets up a salt circle in the parking lot, piling it thick so the low wind won’t carry it away, and then pulls the matches and gasoline in with him.  
   
“Dean?” he asks, “what now?”  
   
“Same as always. I fight, you burn.”  
   
“Burn what? We didn’t find what’s tying her here.”  
   
“The whole thing,” Dean says without skipping a beat, and Sam just gapes at him. Sure, it’s deserted, but burning down a _whole building_ just to get one ghost?  
   
Dean, though, doesn’t care. “Quickest way,” he says, like that settles it. And for him, it probably does. Sam insists on hunting, and Dean insists on protecting Sam while he does it. And Sam, choked and winded and exhausted, can’t think of another option. He nods, slowly, and makes his way to the Home steps.  
   
“Fine.”  
   
He’s got the wooden steps and front porch doused, and is just cupping a light match in his hand when the ghost appears in the doorway. She makes no move toward him, but the wails she lets out say she would if she could. It’s a good sign that she can’t leave the building, whatever’s keeping her around probably really is in there, but Sam still wants to put as much distance between them as he can.  
   
Incensed by her impotence, the ghost rattles the whole frame of the building, and Sam drops the match and stumbles back.  
   
Dean, useless, waits at his side.  
   
It’ll take some time for the whole building to catch, and Sam can only hope the area really is deserted enough for it to get far enough in time. They have to stay and watch, just to make sure, so he turns to head back to the salt.  
   
He makes it halfway before he’s struck, hard, at the base of his skull. He drops like bricks, tumbling and haphazard, and only tries to open his eyes once before his vision swims and he closes them again.  
   
Behind him, he can hear Dean shouting and the crashes of unleashed furniture being tossed from the porch. He hears pieces land and shatter beside him, and the longer he lays there the more his breath slithers from him, leaving him panting and chilled. Sam can feel the lapping in his lungs, more accustomed to the feeling now. It isn’t a steady rise, more like the ebb and flow of the ocean, as if the amount of water in his lungs actually expands and shrinks as he tries to breathe .  
   
When he looks back, just once, he can see Dean full-on pummeling a haggard old woman, and he has her pinned to the floor just as he yells, “Get in the salt!”  
   
Thankfully, the lake in his lungs eases up just at that moment, and he crawls fully into the circle before he passes out.

~*~

   
“Come on, Sammy. Jesus. Wake up, you gotta wake up.”  
   
Sam blinks his eyes open, pulse thudding in time with the throb in his head, then wishes he hadn’t.  
   
“Dean?”  
   
Dean’s voice is all thrashed relief, desperate and oh-so-close. “Sammy?”  
   
“Dean,” he groans again, and attempts to roll over. It’s a rough process.  
   
“You gotta break the salt, kiddo.”  
   
“What?” Sam’s mind is like mud, murky and impossible to reason through, and it takes Dean two more tries to get the message across.  
   
Eventually, Sam flings an arm out, spreading a hand out along the pavement until he feels the tiny grains on his palm and under his fingernails, and then he brushes them aside.  
   
Dean’s relief is audible, but nothing much changes aside from his hands sending a chill down different parts of Sam’s body as he checks for injuries. Even as he murmurs to Sam and makes him answer he’s still essentially unable to help Sam up, and Sam lies on the rough asphalt panting and wincing until he can do it himself. Dean’s hands against Sam’s forehead feel nice, though, a soothing counterpoint to the throbbing from the back of his neck, and he lets himself relax into it until Dean gets too loud, telling him not to fall asleep.  
   
Dean won’t stop talking, keeping him awake and urging him up. If Sam can just get in the car he’ll take care of the rest, he swears, and though Sam believes him nothing on this earth short of an actual hand to help him up will make him go any faster. He just needs to lay there.  
   
It’s half an hour before Sam can sit up, and another fifteen minutes before he can pour himself into the car. It jostles his head and he groans, but his seat belts buckles itself for him and before Dean can even ask him to drive the car’s taking off, an urgent but safe 50 mph.  
   
Sam lets his head loll against the window as they make their way back to the hotel. It’s uncomfortable, curling up for a front seat nap on the driver’s side, but he never gets to ride shotgun anymore. That’s Dean’s spot now, even when he’s taking over the car, because Sam’s supposed to be the responsible one here. When they’re driving, or shelling salt rounds, or meeting witnesses. He feels it catching up to him now, how tired he is. And his head hurts.  
   
And still, when they get back to the motel, Sam has to roll himself up from the driver’s seat and find his keys ‘cause he’s the only one who can. It may take him three tries, but that’s on Sam too.  
   
Dean hovers as he crawls into bed, trying to convince him to take his boots off first, but for Sam that doesn’t rank above getting comfortable and tanking out, so he doesn’t.  
   
Sam’s just about to slip back into unconsciousness, soothed by the faint glow of Dean so close and his arm cooling the soreness at the back of Sam’s neck, when Dean’s talking slips into a tone much more thoughtful.  
   
“Hey, Sammy? Do you think possessing something is the same as haunting it?”  
   
Sam grunts.  
   
“I mean, I’m camped out in the Impala, but is she really what I came back for?”  
   
Sam mulls the question over. Reason and logic has been slowly returning since he woke up but, no, that still doesn’t register with him. He just says, “Sleep,” and Dean lets it go.  
   
In the morning, his phone is crying insistently from the pocket of the jeans he’s still wearing, and it takes Sam long enough to fish it out that it stops ringing. That’s fine by him. He nuzzles back into the pillow, thinking about another four hours of sleep, when it goes off again.  
   
“’lo?” he asks groggily.  
   
“Sam? You up?”  
   
Dean, who never quite let all the petulance from his childhood go, would have once upon a time said something passive aggressive and predictable. Like _I am now_ or _only since I knew you were calling_.  Sam, though, sometimes feels even younger.  
   
“No.”  
   
Bobby’s probably rolling his eyes on the other end.  
   
“How’s that hunt going?”  
   
“’s done. No problem.”  
   
“Yeah?” Bobby asks, his drawl as unamused as ever. “You sound a little worse for the wear there.”  
   
Sam shakes his head, regrets it, and repositions the phone so he can speak a little more clearly. “Don’t trouble yourself, Bobby. We’re fine.”  
   
Bobby’s silence broadcasts his disbelief, and Sam adds, “Really. Safe and sound.”  
   
“Sam?”  
   
“Yea?”  
   
“Now, when you say ‘we’…”  
   
Sam realizes his mistake far too late. He stumbles to cover it, but Bobby’s one of the few people – possibly the only person – left alive that Sam has trouble lying to. He has to try, though.  
   
“Me. I mean me. I’m just concussed. Wasn’t thinking.”  
   
“You know, I ain’t seen you around for a bit. You wanna maybe swing by? Got some transcripts I could use your help with.”  
   
“Bobby,” Sam says, forcing himself up to sitting with a groan. “I’m fine. Just sore and a little out of it. I’ll be fine by the weekend.”  
   
“Yeah. You sound fine.” His sarcasm is laid on thick, but it’s not unkind. It’s familial, even, and Sam might have softened a bit more if he wasn’t getting that nitpicky care-taking routine in spades these days.  
   
Besides, Sam can manage on the phone, but he doesn’t know if he can lie to Bobby’s face. Or, either way, he doesn’t want to.  
   
“I’m fine,” he says, with more emphasis that doesn’t quiet resonate with the ‘responsible adult’ vibe he’s hoping to put out. “I’ve got another hunt lined up, anyway. East. I can’t even swing around for another couple weeks, at the least.”  
   
“Great,” Bobby says, “I’ll see you by the end of the month then. You take care, Sam.”  
   
Then there’s the clatter and click of an old fashioned corded phone, and Sam sighs. Dammit.  

~*~

  
They’re pulled off into a clearing on the side of I-80 in New York, and Sam’s balancing an empty coffee cup on his open palm. The day is still, and flat. The humidity sticks to him, making even his light tee too hot and his jeans downright uncomfortable. A breeze would be merciful but, as it is, not a single leaf is wagging. There’s not a thing to knock the paper cup from Sam’s open hand except divine intervention.  
   
Or if Dean could get his fucking act together.  
   
He’s been trying, there’s no denying that, and if he were alive there’d be sweat dripping down his temples. But no matter how hard he stares or how constipated he looks, Dean can’t manage to tip it over.  
   
Sam’s pretty sure he should be able to by now. Not that he actually knows a damn thing about the timeline of ghosts’ abilities, but they’d fought new ghosts that’d given them a good thrashing, and if those ghosts could figure it out on their own, probably without even knowing they were dead, Sam and Dean’s ghost should be able to figure it out together. Theoretically.  
   
Most spirits, despite their knack for chucking large objects at Sam’s head, had turned out to be a pretty quick and painless pastime. After Sam had come out the other side of his concussion, Dean had filled him in on what exactly happened. It was like that demon, the first time Sam ever saw this Dean fight. Once he’d figured out how to make contact, they’d basically just beat the shit out of each other.  
   
One ghost to another, they could grab, hit, shove, and all around affect each other bodily which, these days, leaves Sam free to sneak off and torch the body. Because as much as ghosts could do a person serious harm, they aren’t exactly packing. They can’t light each other on fire, or tear through ghost-flesh with a bowie. Add to that that when ghosts are tired, or weakened, they just disappear and Sam’s willing to bet Dean can’t actually be killed in a ghost fight.  
   
Actually, he isn’t willing to bet, but it’s a comforting last-ditch thought anyway.  
   
They’ve taken out quite a few in the intervening months, and that’s all fine and dandy, but he doesn’t want to become Sam Winchester: Ghost Hunter. There are other things, bigger things, that Sam wants to get back to. Things that have taken hunters down and deserve a little vengeance served up piping hot. And if Dean’s going to be upping his ghost mojo anyway…  
   
Dean’s tried swinging at the cup, barreling full into it from twenty feet away, and then focusing his Jedi mind powers on it, but they’ve still got squat. If the cup was an animal, it’d be sitting in the field munching on grass, looking more comfortable and secure in the face of a predator than an herbivore had any right to. It’s put Dean in a right foul mood, and Sam’s not far behind him.  
   
“Dean, it’s alright. We’ll try again later.”  
   
“No,” Dean grunts, eyes intense and focused, and Sam thinks if he could just translate that energy into action they’d be in business.  
   
“Fine. So, what do you do when you go for other ghosts?”  
   
“Nothing. I just hit them.”  
   
“Yeah, but how?”  
   
Dean rips his eyes from the cup to glare at Sam, but he knows the anger isn’t really intended for him. This Dean probably _can’t_ get mad at him.  
   
“I just do! It’s like being,” he swallows and looks away to shrug. “It’s like being alive. You swing your fist and you know it’s gonna hit them because your fist and their face are in the same place at the same time.”  
   
“Okay, so just _know_ that you’re gonna hit the cup.”  
   
Dean looks at him like he’s still concussed. “It’s on a different plane of existence.”  
   
“So’s the Impala,” Sam says. “I know you can do this.”  
   
But he can’t. They’ve been at it for an hour and he still can’t. After another fifteen tries, five of which are from the Impala because Dean thinks he’s ‘stronger’ in there, Sam calls it quits for real. Of course, Dean continues to bitch and moan until Sam promises they can try again the next day, except it’s incredibly rational bitching, focusing on Sam’s safety and theorizing on the logistics of ghost-to-ghost-to-reality warfare.  
   
They’re about thirty miles from the county line when Sam says, “Dean, put some tunes on, would ya?”  
   
The stereo blinks, so Sam knows Dean’s present and aware, and then Nirvana starts playing softly throughout the car.  
   
And the thing is? Dean fucking _hates_ Nirvana.  
   
“It’s fine, Dean,” Sam calls, because when he pictures Dean tucked away in the engine sometimes he still feels like he has to yell to be heard through all that metal. “We can listen to a different album.”  
   
“It’s alright,” he answers, voice overlaying Cobain’s through the radio.  
   
“No, really. You can pick something else.”  
   
“Really, Sammy. I don’t mind.”  
   
“Dammit, Dean.” He smacks his palm on the steering wheel, and then wonders if that counts as hitting his brother. Which of course leads him to feeling guilty, and then angry that he’s guilty, and so on in a loop of aggravation that bleeds straight into his voice. “Just pick something else.”  
   
The album fades immediately, but after a full thirty seconds go by Sam realizes Dean’s not going to play anything else. He probably doesn’t know what to choose – doesn’t know what won’t make Sam mad, like just because the game has changed he’s forgotten all the rules he learned before.  
   
The silence lasts all of ten minutes before Sam’s pulling into the first motel he sees – it’s not even dinnertime yet but what the hell – and gets out of the car.  
   
“I’m going to that diner by the corner.”  
   
Dean revs the engine and pushes the driver’s side door open. Sam just looks at it, and turns towards the road.  
   
“Sammy.” Dean’s instantly at his side, barely visible in the wan sunlight, but all too easy to hear. “Where ya goin’?”  
   
“I told you. The diner.”  
   
“That’s almost a mile back. Hop in the car.”  
   
Sam doesn’t even try to look at him. “I’m walking. I’ll be back before sundown.” Which, of course, does nothing to actually dissuade Dean from following him.  
   
“Sammy,” Dean says, just a little bit upset and a lot confused, and it’s just… lacking. There’s just nothing there. The Dean-ness that Sam was so used to, the commands and the derision and the no nonsense way he stood his ground that always let Sam know when he really cared, they’re all gone.  
   
“Don’t call me that,” he snaps.  
   
“It’s your name,” Dean answers, still too meek.  
   
Sam stops, actually plants his feet and looks at where he’s pretty sure Dean is. “It’s Sam. My name is Sam.”  
   
“It’s Sammy too.”  
   
“Not always. Not when I’m pissed, or whiny, or we’re just sitting in the car and there’s no goddamn reason to call me Sammy.”  
   
“Sammy,” Dean starts plaintively, and Sam speeds up. “I don’t know why you’re so pissed.”  
   
“I’m not mad.” Sam puts absolutely no effort into making it sound convincing.  
   
“Don’t worry about the coffee cup, alright? We’ll try again tomorrow.”  
   
“It’s not about the coffee cup! Can’t you just, I don’t know, man up? It’s fine. We’re pissed, we’ll get over it. We don’t have to hash this out like pre-teens in the girl’s bathroom.”  
   
And yes, okay, he’s pretty sure he’s heard that – those exact words – come out of Dean’s mouth before, and the irony of how he’d fought them then isn’t lost on him, but this is different. He just needs Dean to… to… be _himself_ for five fucking minutes.  
   
They round another few bends in silence before Dean speaks up again. “I thought you liked hashing things out?”  
   
Sam just groans, and takes his time spooling up the energy to answer that one, when they round a final crop of trees and find themselves practically on the doorstep of the diner.  
   
“Hey, Dean?” Sam asks, a little cautiously. “You here?”  
   
“Yeah, Sammy. ‘M right here.”  
   
“Can I, uh, can I see you?”  
   
“What’s up?”  
   
There’s nothing for a moment, and then Sam sees a trick of the light to his left. It’s like Dean’s walking in from another dimension, like all those sci-fi movies with invisible portal doors in the middle of open scenery. First and arm, then a head and body, and then the rest of him come into view, stepping out of the sunlight and into the shade. Dean’s really here.  
   
“Dude,” Sam says. “You just walked three quarters of a mile.”  
   
Dean blinks.  
   
“From the _Impala_.”  
   
There’s a pause while that sinks in, Dean looking around and back down the road and then finally back at Sam. His mouth falls open.  
   
“Huh.”  
   
Dean just walked the whole way, at least double his typical range and that, as they say, is something.  
   
“Huh,” Sam says back.  
   
Dean rubs the back of his neck, trying not to smile.  
   
It doesn’t really solve anything, but it diffuses the day a little, and Sam makes himself smile so that Dean will too.  
   
“I’m just gonna run inside for a doggy bag. Ten minutes.”  
   
“Sure,” Dean says, staying his ground.  
   
At the same time, someone from behind Sam calls, “Hey, feller.”  
   
Sam turns, pivoting through the dirt of the parking lot. He sees that the guy really is talkin’ to him, and says, “Yeah?”  
   
“Who you talkin’ to?”  
   
Sam looks at the guy, worn jeans, cigarette-stained fingers and an air of comfort that just screams that he’s a regular, and then back at Dean. Who waggles his eyebrows and waves.  
   
“Huh,” Sam says again.  
   
On the walk back, Sam tucks his hot food under his arm and looks at Dean, who’s sticking to the shade so that he stays visible. “Hey Dean,” he says, and since this isn’t his real brother – not all of him, anyway – he figures he might want to hear this. “Sorry I yelled.”  
   
Dean brightens up, not just metaphorically but luminescently too, and grins. “It’s okay, Sammy. ‘S been a long day.”

  
~*~

   
A month later, they’re holed into a room with a twin bed and no sink, waiting out the worst blizzard Kansas’s mustered up in some ten odd years, and Dean moves a penny across the table. Sam laughs and Dean huffs, but they both call it a win.

~*~

   
 **2011**  


  
~*~

  
Quail Springs, Oklahoma is a city big enough to have a Best Buy, and Sam pulls out one of the good credit cards to get them a GPS. It says its name is Jill but Dean calls it an idiot and a bastard, and disappears into the engine whenever Sam turns it on.  
   
By Missouri, the thing’s nowhere to be found. Sam asks once, gingerly, whether Dean’s seen it.  
   
Dean says Jill was a very nice lady, and it’s too bad she can’t see more of the country with them.

~*~

   
Dean’s still not the best to bring along on interviews. Even if no one can see him, they can feel him, and a skittish family member is a quiet family member. It is helpful scouting out places Sam can’t reach, though, like basements and air ducts and pretty much any room someone’s trying to keep Sam out of.  
   
He still doesn’t want Dean anywhere near Bobby’s, though. Dean’s presence is like a storm in July: chilly with just a touch of humidity, but notably out of place. Besides, Sam doesn’t know what wards he’s got up, and he doesn’t want to raise Bobby’s guard any. Dean doesn’t take well to staying in the car, but Sam manages to convince him that, this time, he’s not just being brave or petty. Bobby really can’t know.  
   
It took them the better part of a year to roll into Sioux Falls, and by that time Bobby’s voicemails had gone from concerned, to panicked, then to angry and back again. Sam’d only even returned a handful of them, avoidance his strongest weapon where Bobby was concerned, but for all his vim and vigor he still hugs Sam in like he’s just returned from a treacherous tour of battle overseas.  
   
The whole place smells like whiskey and leather and gunpowder, and Sam had forgotten how comfortable it was here. Not that he has any interest in seeing his old room, the one that had housed him through his teen years and then later through his grief, but the sofa in the study is nearly as comfortable as the Impala.  
   
Bobby asks after him, congratulating him on hunts well done and checking on some stitches that could use a second opinion. The name Winchester has been coming up more, apparently, but ever since Dean died both the demons and angels have fucked off to their respective dimensions and now it’s good things Bobby’s hearing around town.  
   
Sam laughs and gives him an _aww, shucks_ grin, and Bobby says, “Damn, boy, I’m just glad you’re not drinking yourself stupid.”  
   
His smile fades a bit at that, feeling almost like he has to justify not being more of a mess, but Bobby’s as good a friend as he is a father and doesn’t press the issue. Instead, he pulls out a heavy fabric-bound tome, and hefts it onto his desk.  
   
“What’s that?” Sam asks. “You still got some transcripts to go over?”

Bobby snorts. “What, you think you got here in a timely manner? Got a real prickly guy just come into town for some trade, and I could use you there with me.”

   
“Sure thing,” Sam says, all cool and casual, until Bobby actually starts heading for the door. “What, now?”  
   
“You got someplace else you need to be?”  
   
“What? No,” Sam swears. “No.” Then he stands up to grab his coat and jingles his keys. “I’ll drive.”  
   
No way is he leaving the Impala behind for God knows how long, and especially not without telling Dean first. He’d probably blow a gasket or, worse, follow them. Sam has no idea how he’d explain that one to Bobby, short of proving the existence of memory charms and then dabbling with them.  
   
Bobby stares at him like he’s lost a few screws along the way, and a bit like he did when he was shut in upstairs, but says nothing.  
   
He whistles when he sees the car, running a finger down the edge of the trunk and lifting nothing but the finest layer of dust from that day’s drive. Luckily, it’s below freezing, so Dean’s personal storm cloud won’t register if they stay outdoors or in the car.  
   
“Lookin’ good, Sam.”  
   
“Uh. Thanks.”  
   
“You know, I kinda thought I’d be hearing from you more once you set out on your own,” he says, lowering himself into the passenger’s seat. “If for nothing else than to keep this ol’ girl running.”  
   
Sam starts it up with a smooth rumble that puts him at ease, and Bobby takes to admiring the car again.  
   
“Didn’t know Dean’d taught you so well,” he says and then, with a somber reverence that the car really does deserve, “He’d be damn proud.”  
   
Sam swallows and looks away.  
   
“You got that converter?”  
   
“What?”  
   
“Seem to recall, Dean was sniffing around for a new torque converter. Didn’t think he found one before – well.”  
   
Sam can pass his silence off as grief, which is a relief, even if he does feel like a bit of a shit acting more fucked up than he is over his own brother’s death, but only for so long. Eventually he says, “Yeah. I, uh, followed up one of his leads. Found one in a few weeks.”  
   
When his eyes flicker to the rear view mirror, he’s relieved to see Dean there. It’s just bright enough that Sam thinks he couldn’t see him without the backdrop of the black seats. He does wish Dean could take this conversation for him, though, or transplant thoughts directly into his brain so that he wouldn’t have to BS his way through this conversation. He doesn’t have a clue about converters, or even that the Impala had needed one.  
   
“How much it go for?” Bobby asks, and Sam knows he’s just talking shop, trying to stick to the mundane, but Sam’s out of his depths like a preteen at Senior Prom. He doesn’t even know what ballpark to aim for. He could say a few hundred and hope that sounds about right – he can deal with some ribbing at being ripped off, or boast a bit about getting a great deal, once Bobby leans one way or the other.  
   
Behind him, Dean catches his eye in the rear view mirror again and says, “Tell him we got it for two fifty.”  
   
Sam nods, mostly to himself, and looks to Bobby to regurgitate the answer. Even as he does, though, Bobby’s gone stock-still and is clutching at the seat like it’s made of salt rounds. Slowly, slowly enough that Sam has time to cringe, Bobby tucks his chin back over his shoulder, and then he swears.  
   
“God _dammit_ , boy! What did you do?”

“Nothing!”  
   
“You said you burned him!”  
   
“I did! Everything I could find.”  
   
“Damn it all,” he cusses, and scratches under his hat. He sounds panicked and beaten down, like Sam brought a dead body to his house and told him the cops were already on their way, and that’s all he says for a good long minute.  
   
“Bobby,” Sam starts, but he holds a hand up.  
   
“No. Don’t you go justifying this mess. You don’t say a word.”  
   
It’s Dean’s voice that chimes in next, and Bobby flinches harder than Sam’s ever seen.  
   
“ Bobby, it’s—”  
   
“You neither! Jesus boys, you’re digging me an early grave.”  
   
“How come,” Sam starts, and he has to swallow at the frigid look Bobby gives him. “You can see him?”  
   
“Course I can see him. It’s sitting in the back goddamn seat.”  
   
“Not, uh, no one else can.”  
   
“Yeah, well, guess your boy forgot to put up his blinders there, didn’t he?”  
   
Sam looks back to Dean, who looks as out of the loop as Sam. If he had blinders apparently they’d been stuck on all year, because they’d never had this problem before.  
   
Bobby’s just staring between the two of them, incredulous, and then he heaves a sigh that pushes his gut out against the seat belt until he unbuckles it.  
   
“Sam,” he says as he rolls out of the car. “Inside. I’ll call R.C. and tell him to meet us tomorrow.”  
   
Sam follows, obedient, with Dean quick on his heels.  
   
“He can’t come inside,” Bobby says without looking back.  
   
“Bobby—” Sam starts, but Bobby stops on his heels and levels a look back at him.  
   
“He _can’t_. It’s warded. Tell him to wait out here.”  
   
“Sammy,” Dean says, trying to step between him and the house. “No.”  
   
“Dean, it’s alright.” He steps around him. When Dean puts himself back in Sam’s path, Sam just moves on, accepting the shiver of passing through his brother as part of everyday life. “We’re just gonna talk.”  
   
Dean looks beyond miserable, a pitbull that’s been caged and kicked all at once, and keeps to the shadows so he can look as solid and formidable as possible.  
   
“You yell, Sammy. Anything goes the wrong way, you yell and wards or not I’ll find a way in there.”  
   
“Dean.” He rolls his eyes. “It’s just Bobby.”  
   
But Dean just says, “Yell.”  
   
Which he won’t need to do, except Bobby cuffs him upside the head as soon as he steps inside, and Sam lets out a high grunt before he remembers he should pay heed to not alerting Dean.  
   
“What were you thinkin’?”  
   
“Nothing,” Sam insists, ducking and avoiding another hand coming at his head.  
   
“And you couldn’t tell me ‘bout this ‘nothin’ you’ve been up to?”  
   
Sam coughs, quietly, and rubs at his head some more.  
   
“Soon as you can get that pile o’ crazy to calm down, you and me are getting in my truck and drivin’ all the way back to that swamp.”  
   
“Bobby.”  
   
“We’re gonna burn that whole place down if we have to, but this ain’t gonna last past sun up.”  
   
Sam waves a hand through the air, sharp enough to cut him off. “It won’t help.”  
   
“Yuh-huh. Let’s see if it helps when the match I take to it isn’t a big stickin’ lie.”  
   
“I’m not lying,” Sam yells and then, feeling too much like a chastised teenager again, he straightens up and repeats himself. “I’m not lying, it’s just not the swamp.”  
   
“What, cursed object then?”  
   
Sam cringes, because it’s not a curse, dammit, it’s just— He looks through the delicate lace covering Bobby’s window, watching Dean pace in and out of the sunlight.  
   
“It’s the car,” he whispers. “And I can’t. Anything else, but... You don’t know, Bobby, you don’t even know. I had Dad’s journal and Dean’s jacket and the pearl-handle. All ready to go. I was going to burn them all,” he says, finally looking up with wild eyes. He doesn’t really think about it often, can’t bear to dredge it up, but he was ready to mourn another pile of ashes just to give his brother peace. The car, though, burning that would be burning everything. Home and family and everything he had left.  
   
“Son,” Bobby says, now approaching him with a hand out. He lays it on Sam’s shoulder, gentle, and Sam turns away because he’s gone from zero to losing it in about sixty seconds. “Sam,” Bobby tries again. “He’s sufferin’. You know that.”  
   
Sam laughs, but it’s a sharp, mirthless sound. “I don’t even think he is. I know that, it’s why I even tried in the first place, but he’s not like that.” He stares, now, at Bobby, willing him to believe based on sheer tenacity alone. “He’s only upset when I’m bleeding, or ask him to wait in the car. If I thought he was in pain, I would, even the car, but—”  
   
“I know you think he’s all you got, Sam. But if any part of that thing actually is your brother, don’t you think you should think on what he needs?”  
   
“I am, Bobby. He wants to be here.”  
   
“They all do. Why do you think they fight us so hard? Sam,” he insists. “You don’t gotta trouble yourself. Why don’t you just check out the backyard with him, show him the clunkers that could use a little ghostly spit-shine. I’ll just take care of a few chores up front.”  
   
Sam bows his head. It’s, Jesus, it’s enough to make him boil. He can’t just play decoy while Bobby offs his brother – and that’s what it’ll be; he never really thought of ghosts as alive before, but this Dean’s sure as hell not dead. Not all the way. Dean’s died so many times, each more mind-blank scary than the one before, but somehow this seems to outweigh all the rest. If he goes this time, it’ll be the last.  
   
Except Sam knows somewhere, in a tiny voice buried beneath years of hope and habit and comfort, that this is the easiest out he’s going to get, and he should take it. He sees Bobby’s feet shifting uncomfortably, knows he has to pick a position on this soon so Bobby can get on with the convincing or the condolences, but then they hear someone at the door.  
   
It’s not a knock, more just the rattle the door would make if someone had knocked. It’s Dean’s new trick. Steady pressure is still a bitch of an idea but they’ve been working on brief points of contact; perfect for knocking on doors, luring nasties into traps, and tipping over Sam’s soy macchiatos, just because he can.  
   
Sam turns to Bobby for confirmation, who looks confused, wary, and then exasperated, before opening the door. Dean’s sprawled out in the doorway, casual as ever like the wards are actually really comfortable to rest against, and that’s definitely a bad sign. Nothing about this Dean is _casual._  
   
“Bobby,” he nods.  
   
“Dean.”  
   
“You should know,” he starts, translucent gaze still steady, “that I make sure Sammy’s taken care of.”  
   
Bobby affords him the decency of a straight answer. “Yup. Doin’ a right good job of it, too.”  
   
“And if anyone tries to get in the way of that, anyone – well. I can’t let that happen.”  
   
Bobby blinks, letting years of hunting and poker faces stare back at the ghost in his doorway.  
   
“Dean!” Sam cuts in, shocked and a bit ashamed. “You can’t threaten Bobby.”  
   
Dean sounds so immovably calm, and Sam would be the first to admit it’s more than a little creepy. “I’m not. I just, I can’t let that happen.”  
   
“He’s really not,” Sam insists, like Bobby believes things based on the amount of repetition and not the amount of bullshit stacked behind them. “He can’t even throw things yet.”  
   
“I can do enough.”  
   
It’s as close to a promise as Dean can get and after that, well, there’s really not much left to say.  
Bobby raises his hands in defeat, though Sam’s seen that placating technique enough to call Bobby on his bullshit. Not out loud, though, he’s not an idiot.  
   
Bobby nods, short and final. “Alright then. Sam, you always know where to find me.”  
   
It’s another promise. Hell, Dean probably knows it too, but if anything it just shows that Dean should be glad he’s around. All in favor of Sam not dying – say aye.  
   
Bobby putters around in the worst rendition of minding his own business Sam’s ever seen, but he takes the opportunity to wander over to Dean anyway.  
   
“Hey,” he says, leaning on his own side of the doorjamb.  
   
“Hey.” All the fight’s gone out of him, even as he stares into the living room he’ll never set foot in again. He’s back to being mild and agreeable in the way he usually is for Sam and not the way that makes Sam reach for iron  
   
“You really shouldn’t do that. Hell of a time to drop the Casper routine.”  
   
“I was friendly,” Dean says with a shrug. “He should know how things stand.”  
   
“Hey, Dean?”  
   
He straightens up, meeting Sam at eye level. “Yeah?”  
   
“Are you? You know. Happy?”  
   
“Sammy,” he scoffs. “Of course I am.”  
   
“No, Dean. Really. We both know. Ghosts are miserable, tormented creatures. What if – what if there’s a Heaven, and you could be there right now except—”  
   
“Whoa, whoa, hey. Come on now. We’ve talked about this.”  
   
“I know, but.”  
   
“Sammy,” Dean says low, voice earnest like it gets these days. “We’re no good apart. You die, I die, either way it’s the end of the line for us both. I’m just makin’ sure you take care of yourself this time around.”  
   
Sam nods, more for Dean than himself. He wants to believe him, more than anything, but the alternative is just so horrifying. To think he could be condemning his brother out of pure selfishness.  
   
“I wanted this. I made this choice when I was alive, okay? You can’t argue with that.”  
   
He says it like it’s the truest thing that’s ever passed anyone’s lips, and Sam – Sam has no idea what to do with that. He’s got encyclopedias memorized on how to read Dean, how no means yes but maybe means no. How if he just shrugged and said of course he was happy, Sam would know he’s lying, but if he told Sam to shut his trap and go back to finger painting like the other whiny kindergarteners, he’d know Dean just wanted to hold onto a good thing a little longer before Sam went all Freudian on it.  
   
This, though? The straight-talking’s easy to take at face value when there’s not much at stake, but this. It just.  
   
It just seems so goddamn genuine. It’s a new playbook, a new league, but this Dean has never lied to him and if he can just accept this Dean as _different_ , then maybe these hurdles won’t be so high.  
   
Hell, maybe they won’t be hurdles at all. Maybe Dean really is happy.  
   
He doesn’t know what kind of a picture they make for Bobby there in the doorway, not just conspiring across car seats or state lines but huddling on either side of an impassable divide, taking an intangible distance and shrinking it down until their whispers can make it across.  
   
Dean raises a hand to reach what part of Sam’s elbow he can and Sam leans into it, no matter how the goosebumps spread up his arm like wildfire.  
 

~*~

   
Bobby wishes them well, which is a relief, seeing as how he has every right to throw Sam on his ass in the parking lot of the nearest hunter’s bar. Of course, Sam and Dean would’ve fought them tooth and nail and probably come out on top, but it’s nice it didn’t come to that. Instead, Bobby reminds Sam not to bring his brother round any of those hunter hotspots, ‘specially not near the Jones’ in Wichita, and then even gives him a passcode. If Sam ever says he heard of a hunt in the swamplands, Bobby’ll start the research.  
   
Knowing him, he already has.  
 

~*~

   
Dean’s learned that, sometimes, he should pump Metallica through the speakers for no reason at all. It always surprises Sam, shocks him with blasts of electric guitar, but then he settles into it like an old letterman from his glory days that he usually leaves in the back of the closet. It’s nice, for a minute, a fantasy he’s allowed to have, until Dean inevitably turns the volume down at the end of the song and asks, “More of the same?”  
   
And Sam, inevitably, says yes.  
 

~*~  
   
 **2013**  
   
~*~

Sam’s just stepping out of a bar in Shreveport, folding up worn bills and shoving them in his wallet, when he hears a scream.  
   
It’s not so easy to hustle pool with only one man, and even harder to keep his winnings with no one visibly watching his back. He’s sure that, with Dean’s help, he could strip every last barfly and cocky construction worker of their will to fight, and keep the money besides, but he usually tries not to let it come to that. With only one mouth to feed, and never having to stop for gas, money’s not any tighter than it ever was before.  
   
Still, though, he makes sure it’s tucked safely into his back pocket before he follows the sound. It was feminine, short, and the young woman standing stock-still in the parking lot doesn’t seem to currently be at anyone’s mercy.  
   
He coughs a _Christo_ at her, just for good measure, but she just whips around, startled.  
   
“Oh God,” she says, laughing in a high, embarrassed way with a hand to her chest. “I didn’t see you.”  
   
“You alright?” he asks, trying to adopt some of the South in his accent that puts people around here at ease.  
   
“I thought I saw,” she starts, motioning out into the black. “You know what, never mind. I’m sorry.”  
   
“Don’t worry ‘bout it. What’d you think you saw?”  
 

“Well.” She laughs again. “You’ll think I’m nuts, but, a ghost. Over by that car.”  
   
He doesn’t have to look to know she’s singled out the Impala, and he bites back a smile. Damn Dean and his predictable ways. Now that he really looks at her, he can recognize that she’s just his type. Brunette, dark eyes, small enough to fit under his arm and then some. Nothing like any woman that’s ever burned on one of his ceilings.  
   
“I know, right?” she asks. “There no such thing. Any pre-med worth their salt knows that. There’s no such thing.”  
   
And Sam doesn’t know what it is, that she’s educated or that she’s sweet enough to use old-fashioned idioms. Hell, maybe it’s just the proper respect for salt, he doesn’t know. But he breaks out his best college-days grin, the Sam Winchester Special, and says, “Still a lot of things that go bump in the night. I could give you a lift, if you don’t want to walk in the dark?”  
   
“Umm,” she says, clearly debating ghost visions versus strange, tall men, but eventually decides in Sam’s favor. “Oh God, okay. Yeah. Thanks.”  
   
When she touches Sam’s arm she fits just right, like he could scoop her up and just carry her along, and he lets his fingertips slide across the small of her back.  
   
After she’s in the car and he’s closed the door like a gentleman, he looks at Dean and says, “I can find my own women, remember?”  
   
“Eh,” Dean shrugs. “I just did the easy part.”  
 

~*~

   
The Winchester brothers – singular when in public – make one hell of a team. Spirits aren’t used to fighting when their opponents are already dead, nests are beyond easy to scope out ahead of time, and Dean just plain out gives some things the creeps. Arachnids, Kelpies, anything a bit serpentine, most of them go ears-up (if they have any) the minute Dean gets close, and bolt before Sam can even got a shot off. They’ve made a game of it, even, trying to take them down before they flee for the brush like a fawn in hunting season.  
   
Others – the demons, the witches, basically any chance Sam can get for impromptu Latin. As much time as he spends doing reps and running laps, he also spends memorizing: excorcisms, incantations, invocations. He knows them all.  
   
He’s never looking down on a hunt to read from a book again.  
   
It stacks all the chips in their favor. Some things are still impossible – wendigos take two men, and banshees flat out give him the creeps – but they’re racking up kills like tickets at an arcade. They’ve upped their game with so many creatures.  
   
So it’s ironic, really, that what gets Sam is a ghost. Or maybe it isn’t, Sam can never really remember which definitions of irony were fake, but he sure as hell never saw it coming.  
   
It’s harder to think of them as mindless, and the reassurance that he’s sending them to a better place doesn’t really help his mood, most days. And now, he can’t even blame the guy who put a knife through his stomach. He was tortured – literally – for years. Shut in, beat down, and finally gutted with the knife he was using to chop onions for dinner. That’s probably why Sam’s eyes sting a little as he goes down.  
   
Dean loses his shit immediately, shoving the traumatized bastard straight into a table full of knives from his own childhood. Dean might have trouble going corporeal, but this guy doesn’t, and the table collapses under him until he’s swimming in the implements of his own torture. Dean doesn’t stop to watch, just runs for Sam, yelling about exits. By now, he doesn’t even need Sam to remind him that it has to be a door.  
   
They stumble to the car, all of a hundred feet away, with only minor breaks for heavy panting. Dean’s got the car door open already, and Sam takes the middle ground between holding his side together carefully and throwing himself onto the nearest flat surface. His head is fucking swimming, which doesn’t make sense ‘cause it’s a stab wound and not a baseball bat to the noggin, but he can’t tell whether the lurching is the car or him and all he can think is how cold he is.  
   
His shirts are wet, both of them soaked all the way through, and his jeans too. It leaves his hands slick and sticky. He wants to wipe them off, to feel just a little more human before he can sit up to drive, but there’s nowhere clean to wipe them off on.  
   
 Dean’s got the same old stream of worry in his ear, _how bad?_ and _more pressure_ and _almost there._ Sam doesn’t know where there is, doesn’t know how much Dean is orchestrating from the passenger’s seat beside him. He thinks Dean’s using the flickering pressure of his touch to bat Sam’s hands away and see the damage, but when he moves his hands he—  
   
“That’s it. Up and at ‘em, Sammy. Wake on up, okay?”  
   
Sam blinks.  
   
“How bout we get inside? See the damage?”  
   
That sounds… awful, really. His head’s so heavy, he thinks if he could just put it down for a minute he’d be okay. Just for a minute. Dean’s always so go-go-go! He just – he’s tired. Too tired. Dean can do it and he’ll have to sit this one out.  
   
The radio is sudden, and blaring. It stabs into his ears like a talon, but it also pierces through the cobwebs until he can get that Dean’s asking him to get up. It’s a short walk. Please, he’s saying, for him.  
   
The bed is even better than the car, and Sam should remember to tell Dean this was a good idea. Yes. But right now, Dean’s saying no – no Sammy, not the bed. No Sammy, keep the pressure. No Sammy, don’t close ‘em, look at me.  
   
But he knows Dean is there even after he closes his eyes. He can feel him, pressing into his stomach with a solid weight that’s too reliable to be real. Sam thinks, maybe, this is what it’s like to be dead. Where his brother is just as solid as he is.  
 

~*~

   
Jesus Christ, his head aches. Not just in an Excedrin way, it actually aches. Full on throbs like a banged up knee and is painful to the touch. The only saving grace is that the lights are low, staying as far away from migraine territory as possible, and making it all too easy to drift into sleep.  
 

~*~

   
“Well, hey there sweetie.”  
   
Sam blinks. A lot. The room is bright and painful, just like this woman’s voice.  
   
“Oh,” she says, like she remembered she left her lunch on the kitchen counter, and then the lights go low and Sam likes her a hell of a lot more. “That better?” she whispers, and he croaks a yes.  
   
He didn’t know it’d come out like that, but so be it.  
   
“Okay, we’re just gonna test some vitals, and then you can close your eyes again.”  
   
He keeps them closed now. He knows the drill, isn’t scared or even curious enough to track her around the room. Hospitals are like nosy old women who have fifty years’ worth of newspaper clippings in their attics. They’re time consuming, and a pain, but he’s more likely to come out alive if he lets them help.  
   
The only thing about hospitals is, he doesn’t remember getting to one. Sam weighs the confusion against the cliché and finally clears his throat to ask, “How did I get here?”  
   
“Oh, look at you, poor thing. You marched yourself right to reception, is how. You don’t remember?”  
   
He cracks an eye open enough to see her worrying, eyeing the chart at the foot of his bed and wondering if she should note that down. She shouldn’t; amnesia or not, he doesn’t want them to have any more reasons than necessary to make him stay.  
   
Instead, she slips a pressure cuff around his arm and starts pumping the little bulb in her hand. “Don’t know how you did it,” she goes on. “Do you remember what cut you up so bad?”  
   
Sam winces, and moves a hand gingerly to the scar he can look forward to. “No,” he lies.  
   
“Been down by the swamp, maybe?”  
   
It’s a full body flinch this time, an automatic reaction to a place he rarely thinks of and never goes, and he wonders if she noticed – if she’s really a nurse at all. She looks the part, worn sneakers and short, no-nonsense hair framing her round face, but she could just be the perfect disguise for another beetle-eyed soul sucker. What business does any human have asking him about swamps?  
   
“Hmm.” She purses her lips. “Guess not. Well, Dr. Fuller will probably ask you more. We’re running a few blood panels as we speak. There’s some concern, now, about your kidneys. Your blood was especially dark, which can be indicative of a form of kidney disease. It appeared to be intermittent, which is a good sign, but we want to be proactive about these things.”  
   
She sits herself down on the side of the bed, utterly maternal despite the sudden hospital jargon, and Sam’s half expecting her to measure his temperature with a hand to his forehead. If she’s a demon, she’s doing a hell of a good job. He can tell she’s staying purposely calm, watching him with those wide ‘ask me anything’ eyes doctors use to try to be reassuring. She’s probably expecting more clichés, nervously asking whether that’s bad and if he should be worried. He needs her to back up, though, because he’s got his own figuring out to do. Dark blood could be some sort of clue.  
   
“How dark?”  
   
“Uh? Oh, dark as the night, sweetie.” She says it regretfully. “You had quite a nosebleed when you got to us. Looked just like my boys after wrestling down by the marshes, inhale half their weight in swamp dirt, they do. Thought I’d try out a bit of wishful thinking for ya, til the bloodwork came back, but no can do, I suppose.”  
   
Sam tunes her out, trying to picture it. A black nosebleed sounded demonic or—  
   
He bolts up, jarring his stitches and sucking in a deep breath and his hand comes to press at his side. “My car.”  
   
“Alright there. Hold on, now, just lay back down.”  
   
Her hands are at his shoulders, gentle but steady, and he fights the urge to bat them away. “My car. Where’s my car?”  
   
Something is wrong, it has to be, because he’s been awake for five whole minutes and he’s _alone_.  
   
“I don’t know, but if you’ll just calm down, you can tell me what it looks like—”  
   
He wriggles her hands from his shoulders and says, “The Impala.”  
   
“Just lay down first.”  
   
“It’s a black classic muscle car. Someone will remember it.”  
   
“I’ll have to sedate you if you can’t lay back.”  
   
She’s shrinking back from Sam’s flailing hands, moving towards his IV drip and out of reach, and he tries to grab for her. She can’t put him out, he has to find Dean.  
   
“I need to find it. I need to go.”  
   
And then she’s got a needle in the IV intake valve. He’s still reaching for her, needing her to listen. “Impala. Chevy. 1967. I need it. Please.”  
   
He has just enough time to see the pity in her face before he’s out.  
   
Next he has to deal with the doctor – Fuller, he said – who’s just as unhelpful. They’ve threatened to strap him down, they won’t answer his questions, and Fuller makes him go through his medical history and half his (straight from TV) life story before he lets Sam talk. And then all he says is, “I’m not sure, Barbara might have more information about your car than I do. We were more concerned about keeping you alive, Mr. Tyler.”  
   
“Well,” Sam says with the same indignance of people kept waiting too long for their morning latte, “it shouldn’t be too hard to page her, right?”  
   
He’d just yank the IV himself if he’d had another few days of rest, but these people are his best chance of finding his brother. For now.  
   
Barbara, the nurse-mom, takes her sweet time coming back around but when she does she’s bearing gifts. He eyes the phone number she gives him with barely hidden disgust, but he still manages to say thank you.  
   
They _towed_ Dean’s car.  
   
He calls Bobby instead, begging him to – yes, drop everything – haul ass across four states, and jailbreak the Impala.  
   
“That’s at least seventeen hours, Sam. If I don’t sleep. I don’t see what you want me to do.”  
   
“I don’t know how long Dean can make it, cooped up there. We have to get him out.”  
   
Sam can hear him actively not reaching for his keys. “You know, This undead thing only works so long ‘s you got a good leash on that boy.”  
   
“I was unconscious. Don’t I get a by?”  
   
“Yeah? How many poltergeists go easy on you once they’ve knocked you out?”  
   
“Please,” Sam begged again. “If he’s not freaking out by now, he will soon.”  
   
Bobby heaved a long, guttural sigh. “Alright. Just let me hit the head and then I’ll warm the truck up.”  
 

~*~

   
It’s more like twenty five hours, which is about twenty too long for Sam to do anything but jiggle his leg restlessly, throwing off his blankets and raising Barbara’s ire even further. The hospital is too small and homey to have anything resembling entertainment in the rooms, so Sam has to settle for counting the stains on the wall and wondering how many of them are bodily fluids.  
   
When Dean does finally show up, he’s not any better off than Sam expected. He appears, already in motion, charging through the concrete second-story wall and straight to Sam’s side. He actually overshoots a little, standing somewhat in the middle of Sam, and Sam jumps enough to nearly pull his IV out.  
   
Dean doesn’t notice.  
   
“Jesus, Sammy, are you—”  
   
“I’m fine. I am.” His heart’s going and his stitches tug as he rolls up to reach for his brother, but the biggest shock is how much _fine_ actually washes over him. He’d thought it was just the joys of near-disembowelment, but he’s realizing that flesh wounds take a back seat to just knowing Dean’s not holed up in a junkyard, rattling the fence like an inmate.  
   
“They towed me. Eight miles, Sammy. And I tried, I fought it, but they just kept reeling me back.” Dean spits it out, vehement, but it isn’t the disbelieving tone of dealing with assholes and dimwits that’s so familiar in Dean’s voice. Instead, his face is heavy with apology and worry so deep it etches itself in bones. “I can’t make it that far.”  
   
“Dean.” Sam’s voice is calmer now, his pulse slowing with relief. “It’s alright. You’re alright.”  
   
“Not me,” Dean counters. “It’s you. You were in surgery and those machines started beeping and he was calling out for more blood and I _couldn’t get back.”_  
   
“Dean,” Sam says more urgently. “I promise. We’re fine. See?” He gestures to himself, intact and resting, “Limbs and bodily organs, all accounted for.”  
   
That’s when he notices Dean’s fists are trying to curl in his shirt, to hold on like that alone will keep him tied to Sam no matter where the car goes. If Dean were really here he’d grab onto his wrist, shake it and not let go until Dean was grounded enough to accept that they were both still breathing and no blame was being flung. He wants to do the same now, curl his fingers into Dean’s hands so he has something real to hang onto. Flesh wound or not, it’s Dean who needs the reassurance now. It’s some sort of irony that as soon as Dean would be okay with all of Sam’s huggy-touchy forms of empathy, they’re incapable of touch.  
   
All he can do is repeat, ad nauseum. Dean calms down like a storm slowly trickles off, thunder clouds hanging around long past the threat of any danger, and eventually he realizes he’s very much in the middle of Sam’s personal space. He only moves a little.  
   
“You know,” Sam says once Dean’s gotten a bit more settled. “You could have just let it go.”  
   
“What go?” Dean asks, sharp and quick.  
   
“It,” Sam eyes him, tone casual but sincerity giving him away. “It would be okay. If you want us both to just… Move on.”  
   
Dean takes a moment for that to sink in before going still in ways unnatural even for ghosts. “Don’t think that. I don’t want that.”  
   
“Dean,” he says again. “It would be okay.”  
   
“No!” Dean’s standing now, and Sam can imagine the chair that should have been slammed over in his rage. “Don’t say that. I had to.”  
   
“Had to possess me? Dean, that’s heavy mojo. I didn’t even know you could do that.”  
   
“I _had_ to,” Dean stresses again. “You can’t ask me not to.”  
   
Sam thinks, then, to check something he hadn’t even thought of before. This should have been impossible – not because Dean was weak, but because he was shielded. He pulls up the hand without the IV to slip under the neck of his gown and, sure enough, his fingers skim over more heavy gauze right where his protection tattoo should be. He should get it patched up ASAP, more ink for more protection.  
   
He’ll... think about it.  
   
He pans up to meet Dean’s eyes, conflicted and pained even in the bright fluorescents of the hospital room. “How?”  
   
Dean shrugs, an old self-deprecating gesture. “I couldn’t stay still. You needed pressure, Sammy. Fuck, I shoulda just taken you to the hospital first, but I couldn’t stay solid long enough to apply pressure.” He raises his hands, judging them and deeming them unworthy. “So I did what I could with the spare knife. Short, quick moves, until I could get you out of there.”  
   
“You left a wicked hangover, man.”  
   
Despite how Sam’s head throbbed for a solid day afterwards, it’s an attempt to lighten things up.  
   
Dean’s having none of it. “Lesser of two evils, Sammy. I had to.”  
   
“Dean.” Sam slides a hand across the thin, cotton blanket towards his brother. “Don’t. Next time, don’t.”  
   
He looks wrecked, worse than when he barreled in, but Sam can’t let himself be sorry. It’d be better if Dean stopped trying so hard to keep them each on two feet. Better for them both. They could just… pass on. Together.  
   
A knock on the door precedes Barbara’s head poking in, but just barely. She’s oblivious, an overtaxed smile for Sam and not even a bit chilly, but Bobby behind her has no problem spotting the dead man in the room.  
   
“You’ve got a visitor,” Barbara tells him, and he gives her the first genuine smile he’s managed since he realized what Dean had done. He’s not exactly feeling it, but he’s sane enough now to realize how being separated from Dean had made him a little crazy.  
   
“Thanks.”  
   
“Four states to pick this guy up,” Bobby starts, yanking a thumb in Dean’s direction like he’s just a schmuck walking by, “and he won’t even stay in the damn car. Heel-clicked his way out once we got within a mile of this place.”  
   
“Yeah,” Sam says, suddenly a bit sheepish. “We figured that out a year or so ago. He’s pretty stuck to the car. Unless.”  
   
Bobby raises an eyebrow. “Unless?”  
   
“Unless he’s with me.”  
   
“Well. Ain’t that peachy.”  
   
Sam avoids his gaze, not really willing to put words to what that means, and Dean seems to do the same.  
   
“Hey,” Bobby splits the silence. “Who died?”  
   
“No one,” Dean says. And then he’s looking back at Sam, flimsy as a thought in the wind but full to the brim with anguish. “I can’t, Sammy. I can’t do that.”  
   
And then he’s, like bad reception shorting out. Sam yells, startled, but if Dean can hear him he doesn’t answer. For all he knows he’s just outside but, “Fuck.”  
   
“Really? Not even ten minutes in and the honeymoon’s over?”  
   
“He shouldn’t have done it, Bobby.”  
   
Bobby eyes him like a kid who likes to taunt rattlers. “Come again?”  
   
“You said it yourself, he shouldn’t be here. I probably shouldn’t have lasted this long anyway, and—”  
   
“You can just go on and shut it right there. I’ve had enough stupidity out of you two already, and on no sleep, to boot.”  
   
“Come on, Bobby. I’m not saying I want to swan dive just yet but, if I gotta, at least something good could come of it.”  
   
Bobby tisks, audibly, and pulls up a rickety plastic chair. “I take it you’re having trouble making him see things your way?”  
   
Sam spreads his hands wide, watching them smooth out the blanket. “He’d agree with me. The real him.”  
   
“Now, just ‘cause he’s a bit narrow-minded in the logic department don’t mean he’s not real.”  
   
“You know what I mean.”  
   
“Sam,” Bobby says, straightening up, “didn’t you look up what happened to your brother?”  
   
“Did I need to? I mean, yeah, of course. I pulled up all the ghost lore on what they can do, and triggers and stuff. But we already knew all that.”  
   
“That’s ‘cause you’re lookin’ in hunting books.”  
   
“And what should I be looking in? Cook books? Coloring books?”  
   
Bobby rolls his eyes, letting Sam know that he’s ten years old and a pain in his side again. “Hunting books got vengeful spirits in ‘em. But, and correct me if I’m wrong, Dean doesn’t strike me as the violent killer type just yet?”  
   
Sam shakes his head. “I told you, just on hunts. Same as always.”  
   
“There are no solid accounts of it, but you hear of it every so often.”  
   
Sam sits up farther. “Of what?”  
   
“A protective spirit. They get confused for vengeful spirits sometimes, which is why no one’s really certain they exist. If they’re protecting the forest you want to bulldoze, well. Then they’re one in the same, I guess.”  
   
“And Dean?”  
   
Bobby snorts. “I think we both know what he’s protecting.”  
   
And, yeah. Obviously. So it wasn’t just luck that made Dean so tame.  
   
“So, what does that mean?”  
   
“I got some books on it,” he says casually, resting back even as the chair twists and creaks beneath him. “He probably won’t even be as strong which, I hate to say, is probably a good thing for the people who cross your path. He just doesn’t have the anger to fuel it.”  
   
Sam nods along.  
   
“And it means,” Bobby adds, looking at him seriously, “there ain’t no chance he’s gonna stand by while you try to sneak past the pearly gates, neither.”  
   
“But if I could just talk him into it—”  
   
“Sam. He said it himself. Hell, he said it the first time I met him. It’s like asking him to ditch the car. He _can’t_. ”  
   
And—Fuck. Sam drops back against the pillow, ignoring how the bounce tugs sharply at his side. Some things never change.  
   
“Guess I’ll be around for a while then, huh? I better get him back here.”  
   
He nods. “Guessin’ you better. And try not to insult his reason for existin’, this time.”  
   
Bobby pushes himself up and then takes up a novel interest in the window while Sam says aloud, “Dean? Can you come back?” That earns him nothing, so he says it louder. “Dean?” Nothing.  
   
“Dean, you gotta come back. Come on, you can’t just leave me here!”  
   
That grabs Barbara’s attention again, but just as he’s waving her off there’s a thin, opalescent shimmer at the foot of his bed, and he turns all his attention to it.  
   
“I take it back,” he says, and then Dean’s staring back at him, as hopeful as he is pained.  
   
“Sammy, I can’t—”  
   
“I know,” Sam says. “Come here.”  
   
Dean remembers to walk around the bed, pulling up by Sam’s head and leaning a hand on the bed.  
   
“It’s just,” and Sam feels guilty even as he says it, but there’s no getting away from it. “I miss you.”  
   
Resignation joins all the other emotions parading across Dean’s face, and his smile is almost wistful. “I’m sorry,” he says.  
   
“Yeah. Me too.”  
 

~*~  
   
 **2014**  
   
~*~

   
Sam’s unpacked a piece of paper and a pen, like Dean asked, and laid them down on the bedside table that’s the only thing this motel has in the way of a flat surface. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t wary, eying the pen like it’s about to erupt with gas like in a James Bond movie and he’ll wake up in seven hours wondering what his name is, but it’s just a pen.  
   
Dean sits on the edge of the bed, eyes closed and hands balled on his knees, wading through concentration. It’s not reassuring, at all, when the pen does start to move – it jerks, rolls a little to the edge, but rights itself and slowly stands upright like an iron filling reaching up toward a magnet. Sam watches it drag across the pad of paper from three motels ago, pressure firm enough to leave a mark but not an indent. There’s two cautious lines, parallel, and then another connecting them like a goal post. Then a smaller, rounded curve begins to form at its side.  
   
Dean hasn’t opened his eyes once, and Sam gets more caught up in watching him than he does in the writing, so it takes him three letters to realize Dean’s spelling something, and even longer to figure out what it is. It’s brief, direct, but – fuck. He’d recognize it anywhere. Those sharp letters, slanted and cramped. Already, he knows this one piece of paper will never see the inside of a trash can. He will fold it up, making smart creases with his thumbnail that don’t mar the letters, and tuck it into the hidden pocket in his wallet. To stay.  
   
When Dean’s done, he’s grinning like a school boy who just learned to tie his shoe. “I’ve been practicing,” he says, and leans over to inspect his work.  
   
There, in Dean’s perfect handwriting, are the words: Happy Birthday, Sammy.  
 

~*~

   
Right before Christmas in 2018, a couple of flunkees in neon rain jackets try to steal the Impala. Sam’s still laughing about that one.  
 

~*~

   
It’s jarring, sometimes – what Dean’s kept, and what he’s thrown away. Sam’s not an idiot, he knew his brother was off from the get-go, but sometimes he just seems so much more… distilled. Like any ghost, Sam supposes, single-mindedly determined and a bitch to argue with.  
   
He was never going to ditch the nicknames, the Sammy and kiddo and Gigantor, but it had only taken a year or so to realize that ‘Princess’ was no longer in Dean’s repertoire. He knows, now, that what he does and doesn’t keep is all for Sam, and he supposes he should be happy about that one.  The girl names were really getting old. And the reminders for Sam to man up and press on. Those still rear their heads occasionally but, given what he knows now, he can usually spot them for the distraction tactics they really are.  
   
Dean’s still a pain on hunts, more so with every passing year, though that’s not really anything new. He wants to take point on every single job, keep Sam safe and sheltered and chanting Latin where the knives can’t reach him, and he’s constantly yelling for Sam to watch out or veer left or, above all, run. Gone are the days of militant obedience, though, of commands given to be followed on point. It stung when Sam realized that – that the authoritarian edge and close-cropped buzz cuts were really something Dean needed for himself. The only things left of Dad, archaic and vestigial, but important to him nonetheless. And Sam had balked at them every single time.  
   
Living with Dean is like seeing his brother’s reflection, and each year holds up one more mirror for the light to bounce off of before the image reaches him. Dean loses details, the smirks and the swagger, until there’s only one thing Sam can see for sure. Dean loves him, no doubt. Even if, sometimes, that’s all he does.  
   
But Dean still picks the music, even if he’s using Sam’s collection to do it. Sam throws in his requests whenever he feels like it, but the songs slips by like road and telephone poles, and it’s one less thing Sam has to worry about. Turns out, Sam likes it that way.   


   
~*~

   
Sam groans, clutching his stomach even as he rolls feverishly against the motel bed.  
   
“Dean,” he calls. “Avenge my death.”  
   
Dean smiles placidly from the chair he’s floating on. “Sure thing, kiddo.”  
   
“Dean,” he groans again, because _Jesus_ it feels like something’s trying to eat its way through his stomach lining. Like Alien. It’s definitely got claws. Or maybe he swallowed a cursed watermelon seed and it really is growing its way out.  
   
“Sammy. I can’t fight a chimichunga.”  
   
“It’s killing me!”  
   
“It’s digesting. Next time, we’re not stopping for Mexican so close to the border.”  
   
Sam whines pitifully as his stomach cramps again. “It was authentic,” he says, face crammed into the pillow.  
   
Dean says, “Exactly.”  
   
Sam waits for his body to relax and the beads of sweat on his face and neck to trickle into the sheet. When he can sound more like a grown man and less like a kindergartener who broke his Transformers he says, “Seriously, Dean. This could be bad.”  
   
“Sammy, if there were any chance…”  
   
Dean starts to sound more serious, closing in from across the room, and Sam opens one eye. Dean’s watching him thoughtfully, halfway between vigilant and resigned, and he just says, “I’d know.”  
   
Which is sweet and all, and Sam pretty much already knew that, but it doesn’t help the cramping or the serious dehydration he’s giving himself, sweat beads fat like raindrops across his neck.  
   
“Can I at least get some water?”  
   
“You sure you can keep it down this time?”  
   
Sam whines, because Dean lets him, and because he probably will just hurl it all back up. Dean disappears, though, and it takes him a few minutes but eventually a plastic cup from the bathroom comes floating through the room, tipping and dripping onto the carpet and the bedspread but still landing mostly full on the bedside table.  
   
“Let’s try it in sips.”  
   
There’s already an empty trashcan by the bed for exactly what comes next, but Dean’s hands are cool against Sam’s sweaty back as he hurls.  
   
In the morning, Sam stumbles across the motel room for his fifth bathroom trip of the night, but all he does this time is piss and drink more water straight from the tap. Dean’s waiting for him on the bed when he comes back, looking kempt and rested, as always.  
   
“I’m thinking we should get a move-on, Sammy.”  
   
Sam lets himself fall onto the bed, curling the covers back up to his neck, and successfully ignores him.  
   
“No, really. I don’t think we should stay here much longer.”  
   
“Don’t tell me your spidey sense is tingling _now._ ”  
   
“Are you kidding? Have you smelled that bathroom? One spark and this whole place is kaboom.” Dean mimes it with his hands, a pretty little slow motion explosion, complete with sound effects. “As soon as 3B lights a cigarette, we’re done for.  
   
Pillows have absolutely no effect on ghosts whatsoever, but that doesn’t stop Sam from launching one straight through Dean, who laughs.  
   
Sam grins. “Jerk.”

~*~  
   
 **2028**  
   
~*~

   
Things stay the same as much as they don’t. Bartops get stickier. Women get younger. The gas they aren’t paying for gets more expensive. And under the watchful care of one Dean Winchester, 1979-2009, his baby brother Sammy lives well into his forties.  
   
Or so Dean likes to boast.  
   
It’s true, it’s all true, Sam just wishes his brother were a little more corporeal so he could smack him upside the head. It’s not like he wasn’t working his ass off to stay alive too, what with all the stabbing and burning and running for his life that he’s done.  
   
And it’s a good thing, no doubt about that. The running list of nasties he’s killed is double most hunters his age – hell, double most hunters period, though he’s basically cheating because he’s had so damn long to rack up the tally. It brings pride to the name of Winchester, earns him a lot less shit at in-the-know bars than he used to get, and is almost, almost, enough to make up for the one creature from the black lagoon that he didn’t gank in time. Though, _almost_ has been the name of the game for a while now, and Sam’s not really banking on that changing any time soon. _Almost_ was a compromise between him and Dean years ago, to quit the drunken, tearful apologies so long as Dean knew Sam had only _almost_ forgiven himself.  
   
Dean, for his part, always seemed more interested in keeping Sam alive, fed, and in good company – though what food counted as edible and what company was good was an ongoing debate. Sam insisted on moderation for most things, and Dean insisted, “Would you just get fuckin’ laid already, Sammy? I can see your blue balls from here.”  
   
“Oh yeah? We adding x-ray vision to the list of imaginary ghost powers now?”  
   
Dean huffs. “Don’t need Superman sight, Sammy, that shit’s painful enough to spot a mile off.”  
   
The irony is that Dean hasn’t been laid in a couple decades, but he’s never once bitched about the neglect of his own equipment.  
   
All in all, the world’s a little weirder this side of forty. People call him _sir_ despite the knife tucked into his waistband and the puffy pink scar that runs straight down under his left eye. Like it was a farce that he’d been able to hide where he’d come from for so long already, like it was time his face finally bore a tear track too fleshy to wipe away. Where he used to look sweet and inviting, it now takes an extra dose of charm to get women to speak to him in bars, much less invite him into their kitchens to talk about lost loved ones. School girls giggle and tell him he reminds them of their dads, and mature women – because he’s learned to call them that, oh boy, has he – have no interest in teaching him a damn thing. It takes a certain class of woman to handle Sam Winchester these days.  
   
Not to say there aren’t any.  
   
And there was seven years ago too, before the scar and the graying temples and the cough that rolled in with the first storm front of every year, sure as the leaves redecorating for autumn.  
   
Her name was Anabel Montgomery of 25182 Cherry Street, Taylor, Michigan, and she was real grateful, honest, but she’d feel a lot better if he wouldn’t mind sleeping on the sofa, ‘stead of the upstairs where all the bedrooms were.  
   
She never even saw the Tulpa, just knew Sam wasn’t the one who broke her front window, and that he needed a good number of stitches when it was all over.  After that, he’d have passed out on the floor if that was all she had to offer, and he slept like the dead with the arm of the sofa in the crook under his knees.  
   
In the morning, though, her gratitude wasn’t nearly so tempered by fear. When Dean had sauntered in to check up on him in the morning, he’d taken one look at the big breakfast spread she’d put together for Sam and sauntered right back out.  
   
“You make her scream the name Winchester. I’ll be in the car.”  
   
It was an oversight that she still didn’t know his last name when she got loud, but she was, at least, creative enough to make up for it.  
   
When he stopped by again, some two years later, his invitation had been rescinded and the door never opened more than halfway. Anabel looked tired, haggard even, but she opened the door with a smile on her face. It wasn’t until she saw him that she ran her eyes from his face to his torn jeans and back again and closed the door so only her face was visible.  
   
She blinked, fingering a pendant around her neck that he didn’t remember from last time, and lowered her voice.  
   
“I don’t, um, you. I’ve moved on, Sam.”  
   
It was the familiarity that caught him. He expected, if anything, something more along the lines of, “Oh? You. Yeah. I’m married now, but I can give you the name of a clean motel in town.” Instead, she said his name like she knew it, knew him, like he wasn’t just a man who boarded up her window a few years back.  
   
“You alright, Anabel?”  
   
“Oh, me? Yeah.” She laughed quietly, casually, and it soothed Sam’s hackles. Women in trouble didn’t smile that easily. “Just exhausted, you know.”  
   
He didn’t know, but he let it slide. “I’ll just be going, then.”  
   
“Yeah, okay, thanks.” But she lingered, and when Sam turned away first, she cleared her throat.  
   
“Sorry. Um, that I can’t invite you in.”  
   
The door had opened a little more as she leaned her hip against it, her smile tugging up a bit brighter, her eyes downcast but watching him all the same. He was sorry too, reminded of the shy but giving woman he’d known briefly one morning, but Sam Winchester did not push these types of things.  
   
“Hey,” he said. “Look.” Then he pulled a receipt for carrot sticks and beef jerky out of his pocket, and a pen. “This is my number. You ever have problems with your window again, you can call me.” Then he flipped the receipt over against the door frame and quickly squiggled it down with his full name. His real name. And sure, ‘window’ might’ve sounded like code for something else – hell, it was – but if anything nasty ever showed up in Wayne county again, he wanted her to be able to call for help.  
   
She nodded, careful not to make skin contact when she took the paper, but as she pushed the door shut he heard her whisper his last name. He also saw, from the corner of his eye, her foot push something out of the doorway to close it fully. Something made of bright pink plastic.  
   
He walked to the car slowly, eyes on her front picture window as she stepped to the living room. She was carrying another something, also pink, and when she leaned down out of sight she came up with a squirming bundle of blankets. A tiny hand reached for the toy, stubby fingers working to grasp tight enough, but when the plastic shook, Sam would have bet his whole weapons trunk that it rattled.

~*~

   
Sam still wonders, sometimes, when the nights are quiet and the motels are especially empty without a second bed, but now that there’s a Rawhead in Southgate, MI it doesn’t matter whose the baby is. Was. Is.  
   
“Why’re we heading so far east?”  
   
“Doesn’t matter,” Sam says, though he doesn’t know why he’s keeping this from Dean. It’s not like he’s tried to stop Sam from doing anything other than get himself killed for the past two decades. Sam, just, he doesn’t know how to say it.  
   
“Is this about that chick who wouldn’t sleep with you again?”  
   
“Her name is Anabel.”  
   
“Aha.” Dean’s proud, puffed up like a rooster. “So it is. There’s plenty of other—”  
   
“She’s got a kid. We’re just making sure she’s okay.”  
   
“She does? Since when?”  
   
Sam doesn’t answer.  
   
He doesn’t even need to knock on the door, spotting Anabel, with lighter hair and fuller breasts and hips, sitting down to dinner with her husband and her two kids.  
   
She said she’d moved on, Sam thinks, but the question remains.  
   
They seem happy enough, chatting over potatoes and reminding the youngest to stop poking his sister. It’s everything Sam would have wanted, once, a scene he would have terrorized Dean and Dad with over canned chili in front of the TV, but he’s long since learned to appreciate any moment when he wasn’t the last Winchester standing.  
   
The older sister is barely bigger than her brother, with a long dark ponytail, but that’s about all he can tell. He contents himself with that, because it’s enough. This woman’s safe, happy, and not in need of his services, window-related or not. They should really go back to Southgate.

~*~

   
“God damnit, Sammy, how could the battery be dead?”  
   
“One’s enough,” Sam says, and trudges on. If the Rawhead doesn’t already know he’s here, it will soon. “I’ve still got the taser as backup.”  
   
And, okay, he doesn’t know how the battery on the second electroshock is dead. He could have sworn he’d charged it. Maybe it was just old or, or maybe he picked up the same battery twice. Except, he would have noticed that, he thinks. He knows he’s reached the age where some hunters start getting sloppy – too many blows to the head just add up – but, no, he’s pretty sure. So he doesn’t know how it’s dead, but it’s too late to haggle over it now.  
   
“One chance is pretty much all we’ve got anyway, right?”  
   
Dean glares at him, two small shadows making up the sockets of his eyes, though the rest of him is a better light than the bare bulb swinging across the old tool shed they’ve boarded themselves up in. It was too open, otherwise, not enough time or enough cover at his back to get one weapon in each hand, and the most Dean can do up against a creature so solid is yell _boo._  
   
“Yeah, well, let’s make it count then. This needs more than one man, Sammy, and that taser’s like throwin’ down a switchblade against a machete.”  
   
Sam snorts. “So, what, you’re saying it’s the size that counts?”  
   
“I’m saying, let’s try not to get you killed.”  
   
Sam sighs. “I got this, Dean. I’m not alone, remember?”

~*~

   
In the end the taser’s a bust, just like the 10,000 volts he tried first, but the wiring to the overhead lamp’s still live and when he gets it to surge it does the trick as good as anything.  
   
The Rawhead fights hard, lumbering but accurate, and Sam getting close enough to jam both ends of the wire into his neck means he gets close enough to be smacked around himself too. Dean’s screaming his head off, something about running and living another day, but Sam’ll be damned if he lets this thing roam suburban Michigan one more night.  
   
It convulses hard, hands outstretched for something to keep it from tumbling to its thick, misshapen knees, but all it gets is an elbow to Sam’s temple. It’s too late for the bastard, but if it could feel anything it at least had the satisfaction of knowing it sent Sam to the ground too. Hard.  
   
The wooden stairs are especially unforgiving as Sam crashes into them, shredding most of them with sheer momentum, but his legs fly through with enough force to jar painfully along the concrete floor beneath them. They’re not broken, Sam can tell, but they’re –  
   
“Dammit, Sammy, how bad is it?”  
   
Sam groans.  
   
Dean’s in front of him, the only light now, laying himself more or less where the stairs used to be.  
   
“Let’s get you to the car. We’ve at least got some ACEs up there.”  
   
And some painkillers. And vodka. It’s not a bad idea, at least worth lifting his upper body, but the idea of curling his legs underneath him through the shards to stand is worth lying back down for.  
   
“Five more minutes.”  
   
He can practically hear Dean wince.  
   
“You want me to just do it? I could get you to the car in two minutes, flat.”  
   
His knees are throbbing enough that he actually considers it, but two minutes now isn’t worth the possession-hangover in the morning, so he shakes his head. Then wishes he hadn’t.  
   
“Just, seriously, five more minutes.”

~*~

   
He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t let himself be seen, especially now with the mangled face and demented legs, so he keeps to the shade under a tree on the edge of the park. Anabel’s husband is here with their kids, and Sam’s just… wondering.  
   
“What’re we doin’ here?” Dean asks, with a chilly gust that Sam had thought was just a breeze.  
   
“Just watching.”  
   
“Oh, okay. Yeah, I totally hang out in parks and stare at small children too. ‘Cause that’s not creepy at all.”  
   
Sam laughs, and swats through Dean.  
   
“Is this one of those vicarious things that you’ve gotta be sloshed to talk about?”  
   
“It’s the little girl, right?”  
   
Sam doesn’t look at his brother.  
   
“You thinking you shoulda made time to have yourself one of those?”  
   
He sighs, thinks fondly of the years when Dean was allergic to direct questions, but he still doesn’t answer.  Then the sun breaks through the trees, warming his back, and Sam knows he’s alone again.  
   
When the soccer ball tumbles over his boot, unperturbed and bouncing along to nestle with him among the trees roots, he doesn’t bother to look up. It’s only when two more feet show up, small and in plastic sandals with sparkles on them, that he rouses himself.  
   
“Can I have my ball?”  
   
He reaches for it, trying to keep his outstretched legs as still as possible, but his hands falter when he looks up, meeting those eyes.  
   
The poor girl’s skinny and knobby all over, small for her age, and cursed with her father’s nose. She has her mother’s face, though, and her hair, and it does just enough to make up for his genes that he thinks she’ll be a high school beauty anyway.  
   
“Mister?” She’s edging away, unnerved by his silence, and then tucking her arms around herself when Dean’s suddenly back.  
   
“Way to creep the kid out, man.”  
   
Sam blinks, and stares.  
   
“Talk to her.”  
   
“Hi,” he blurts out, too loudly. “Your ball. Sorry.” He lean-rolls himself, trying not to look too much like an invalid while he slowly breathes through the twist of his legs, but he eventually turns back to her, balancing the ball between his fingers. “Here.”  
   
He holds the ball out, but when she doesn’t take it he lays it along the ground and rolls it to her, leaning into the sunlight as he does. She barely gets her hands on it when she jumps even farther back, squeaking and startled, like it’s burned her. Sam’s at a complete loss. It’s the scar, it must be. Or how he’s forced to lurch along like a reanimated doll today. He’s good with kids, great with them because, even after so long on the road, he understands that dichotomy of loving their parents but wanting to be their own person even before they can tie their own shoes. But now… now no child has ever been more important than the one standing in front of him in a Teddy the Happy Puppy t-shirt, and she is freaking out.  
   
He’s so worried about getting her to stop squealing, about the other parents around who must think he’s torturing this poor girl, that it takes him several moments too long to notice that she’s actually pointing at the ball.  
   
“What?” he asks, dumbfounded and slow.  
   
“Spider!”  
   
Sam can’t help it, he laughs, and when that earns him a glare he laughs harder.  
   
“Where?” he asks, because he can’t see a damn thing. She has to screw up all her courage, inch closer to the ball, point, and kick the thing back to him.   
   
It’s tiny. Microscopic. He squints and has to lean in closer and then much farther back just to see it, but she’s six so he’s willing to let it slide.  
   
First he flicks it into the grass, then polishes off the rest of the grime with his sleeve until the ball he hands back to her is the cleanest in the whole park. She grins up at him before grabbing the ball and running back toward her family.  
   
“That what you came for?” Dean asks, and Sam half-whirls to meet him. He kind of wants to get out of here so the memory stays as it is, untarnished, and before people spot him conversing with thin air and ask him to leave.  
   
He has… a daughter. Who’s short, and awkward, and afraid of spiders, but will grow out of all that just like he did. In a completely overwhelming moment, he kind of loves her, this little girl who’s only afraid of things she can see. Who has nothing else to fear, knows nothing about the things that go bump in the night. He can kill so many things, spiders the least of them, and he’ll gladly fry them all if it meant she never had to know about any of them.  
   
He can’t even count how my times, by now, he’s told Dean to just let it go. A stomach gash, a fractured femur, a gushing head wound. They could all have been the end, been his and Dean’s ticket out of here, and Sam was alright with that. They’d worked hard, he’d said, he was as close to almost-repented as he was going to get, and fighting some baddie was as good a way to go as any.  
   
But Dean, as much of a dead pushover as he was, had never once let that slide. Dean ushered him from one cover of safety to another, dragged his ass to a hospital when by all rights he should have bled out on an anonymous motel bed, and found him every hidden escape route and back door that have led him right to this day.  
   
Just before reaching the jungle gym, the girl remembers the manners her Mama taught her, and turns back to yell, “Thanks, mister!”  
   
It gives him one last clear view of her eyes.  
   
He regrets how they startle him again, resents it even, because he knows those eyes. Knows how bright they are, how he can follow them through the dark and how, even when Sam’s the last one left to come up swinging, there they are: over his shoulder, at his back, assessing him even before assessing the situation. At the very worst of times—  
   
Except… except for _the_ worst. The guilt twists up into something new, sharper, that tendrils out of his stomach and wraps up behind his lungs, in between his ribs, and it stings in a way Sam didn’t think he was capable of feeling anymore. He knew those eyes, once, but now they only belong to a grade-schooler who will never even know his name.  
   
Because genetics is a funny, funny thing.  
   
“Sammy?” a voice asks, a voice he’s followed all his life, coming from where the sun cuts through the branches. “Car?”  
   
Sam nods. He’s grateful. He’s grateful, he is. For so much. He can even picture the hand he knows is resting on his back, guiding the way even now, and leaving the shiver on his spine.

**~*~**

   
“I’m not on board.”  
   
“You’re never on board,” Sam says, piercing the key into the ignition anyway and starting her up. “You used to like a good throw down.”  
   
“All I like is getting out alive,” Dean answers, and when Sam pauses to roll a dirty look his way, he makes a show of settling into the passenger seat. “Fine. Fine.”  
   
That lasts another sixty miles, but then Dean’s back at it, stalling the car out with some mysterious engine trouble that Sam would have to be dumber than a performing monkey to buy into. Dean, however, takes the opportunity to name hunters and states and the mountain ranges that hide their bones (or, if the stories are true, lack thereof) like a long enough list will do the arguing for him.  
   
“And Joe McKline? With what’s-his-face up in Minnesota?”  
   
Sam rolls his eyes again, guns it a little harder. “What’s-his-face? You can’t even remember his name?”  
   
“That’s my point, Sammy. Wendigos don’t just kill you, they eat you up until there’s nothing left to be remembered by. It’s a two man job, at least.”  
   
“And what are we? One man and a whiny cold spot? We’ll be fine.”  
   
“Who’s to say I can even get that far into the woods? This is reckless, Sammy, and I know you’ve been in the mood to throw caution to the wind since – what? – Ohio? Michigan? But it’s not worth—”  
   
“Dean.” Sam’s voice is sharp, a no-nonsense tone that sounds more and more like their father’s each day, and when he hears it he clears his throat mildly and starts again. “I’m not wet behind the ears anymore, Dean. We’re not. And if I’m free-floating without a net for a few minutes – it’s not like I haven’t before. I’ll just lead it back towards the car.”  
   
Even if he doesn’t, it’s not like hasn’t done this, been the only able-bodied man on the team, for longer than he’d care to count. In the beginning, sheer skill had made up for the lack of brotherly back-up, and now he’s got experience to step in if he’s ever lacking both.

~*~

   
The car is wedged uncomfortably between two trees less than half a mile off, and it’s just dumb luck that lets them find a path in, even with all of Dean’s ability to find traction in the mud and bank turns through trees no car should be able to do.    
   
They’ve got rope, flare guns, a fuckton of gasoline, three lighters, a sat-phone, a pound of soy trail mix, one gallon of water and Sam’s favorite bone-handled knife. It ought to be enough. They’ve also risked a salt ring, keeping Dean and the supplies in and the pissed off motherfucker wendigo out, because Sam had grown up with a security blanket like every other child, only his was $8.99 for a five pound bag and tasted mighty fine on pork sandwiches too.  
   
This wendigo’s a tricky bastard, especially cunning or maybe just socially crippled, but Sam can’t get it to come far enough out of its cave. He’d follow it in except, yeah, when was that ever a good idea? The tepid orange of the sunset only extends so far into the gaping mouth in the cliffside, a good six feet maybe, and beyond that there’s nothing but pitch black and an early death. Sam only brings it up once before he admits it was a stupid idea in the first place.  
   
“Are you unbalanced? I bet it laid a trap right in the open, barely even in the shadows, and you’d be walking right into it now.”  
   
Yeah, stupid.  
   
Tossing flares into the cave? Maybe equally as stupid, because a pissed wendigo is a vengeful wendigo, but it has the double perk of drawing the damn thing out and lighting up the entrance enough to check for _damn, were you really that oblivious_ traps.  
   
“Just aim straight ahead, these things aren’t good at zig-zagging.”  
   
“Yeah, got it.”  
   
“A second flare’s not worth it though. Go for the gasoline.”  
   
“Dean. I know. I got it.”  
   
“Just run as soon as you toss it, I’ll watch for the landing—”  
   
“Damnit, Dean. Not my first rodeo.”  
   
“I’m just getting our strategy down.”  
   
“It’s _down._ Just shut up.”  
   
Dean’s nostrils flare and he straightens up, looking Sam square in the eye. He’d been crouched down with Sam behind a felled tree, partially because wendigos are supposedly spirits and they didn’t want Dean to tip it off, but mostly ‘cause hanging back with Sam was just his MO these days. Sam envies him the hours of crouching he can pull off without needing to stretch.  
   
He’s goading him, he knows, but he’ll care about that later.  
   
Dean just blinks though, milky white, and says, “Let’s try to get this done before dark. On your count, Sammy.”  
   
Sam huffs, rolls his own neck, and doesn’t even bother to steady his hand when he launches the flare straight towards the open pit of the cave. A perfect shot, straight and true, and Sam thinks, _See? Experience. Reckless, my ass._  
   
But experience’s got nothing on a wendigo hovering just within the line of shadow, gushing forward like it’s riding the wave of a burst dam, and it’s out of the cave before the flare even hits the packed earth.  
   
Sam runs – he’s not an idiot – but the gasoline jug is heavy and he doesn’t really want to spark up the whole forest if he can help it. It’s pure instinct that has him checking over his shoulder to track its new hiding place.  
   
It’s smarter than that, though, or angrier, and Sam digs his heels into the soft moss at his feet as it bum-rushes him straight on. Not that he can really track it by eye, not moving that fast, but Dean’s put himself directly between Sam and the cave so it’s a pretty good bet. Sam holds his breath, hoping that the safety of a spirit versus spirit duel is still on their side.  
   
The wendigo stills just behind Dean, like it’s surged through him and found the cold stuck to him like cobwebs, or maybe calling like some ghostly instinct. It leaves the thing suspended in midair, a rarity, all spindly legs and reaching arms and bald, deformed skull exposed to the light and the elements in a moment of true vulnerability.  
   
Sam fumbles for the gasoline, even sloshes some out in the creature’s direction, but it sends the wendigo off. Dean’s already there, though, and it rebounds at an angle, a skewed, crazy angle, and then they’ve lost it. He leaps back into the salt, too treacherous to be without it without a clear line of sight, but the thing’s just gone. There’s no sign, no rustle of branches, nothing but one sonic, booming crack and the furious rustling of branches.  
   
The last thing Sam hears is, “Sammy, run! Run!”

~*~

   
It smells like moss and dirt, wet and moldy, and when he tries to breathe in he gets a mouth full of greenery and a burn down the back of his throat. He pulls his hands in to his sides, shaky elbows up behind him like a grasshopper’s legs to hopefully get some leverage, but his palms sting and no amount of scrabbling at the loose topsoil seems to be helping. It’s freezing, winter set in sudden and harsh on the mountainside, and he lays his cheek back down on the dirt. He pants softly while he waits for Dean to come find him. He tries calling his name, but if Dean answers Sam can’t hear it over everything else. There’s the loud whoosh and call of ringing in his ears, but maybe that’s just his own chattering teeth. He can’t tell.  
   
His vision comes back last, hazy and over-bright, and nothing makes sense at first. They were waiting outside a – a cave, and that’s gone. Gone like Dean and the weapons and the gas. He calls for his brother again, desperate to not to be lost because his limbs won’t work, frozen and numb, and his skull is throbbing with each pulse of his veins.  
   
“Dean!”  
   
“Shhh, shhh, Sammy. I’m here.”  
   
“The salt,” Sam croaks, but Dean’s shushing him all over again.  
   
“It broke. We’re fine, it broke. You’ve got a – Jesus, Sammy. You’re fine.”  
   
Sam blinks, and tries to push himself up again. He’s eager to figure out where he is and then never come back here, but the success he makes is met with  a sharp pulse of pain that roils up his back and down his arms and between his ears. His legs are blessedly untouched, but it’s still sharp, pain like each cell in his upper body bursting one at a time in sickening waves, like electricity that’s so constant the only relief is when the nausea momentarily overtakes it.  
   
“Stop it, Sammy, stay down. God, Sammy.”  
   
He groans and collapses, curling his fingers into the dirt until there’s mud under his fingernails and stuck to his face, heaving sharp breaths through the pain.  
   
“Dean?” he asks, hopeful.  
   
“You’re fine,” he says, sounding every bit the authoritarian that he used to when the older kids in school had still been fond of swirlies and Dean would take him home sopping wet. And if Dean’s being a little too insistent on this one, well, that’s just Dean.  
   
“What happened?”  
   
He hears Dean suck in a breath, hears the words stick in his throat, and he starts to tense against the news before his back reminds him that’s a painfully bad idea.  
   
“It’s alright, Sammy. You’re just a little pinned down, but you’re fine. A little heave-ho and you’re good as new.”  
   
“Pinned by what?”  
   
The more he gets his bearings the more his body wants to lie catatonically still, and he’s starting to grit his teeth just to speak now. Through the blur of his blinking eyes he sees the white light of Dean. Close, probably holding onto his hand, but Sam hadn’t noticed. A shiver wracks through him, jarring all those jagged, delicate spots in his body he had just started to relax, and he has to turn his face full on into ground to keep a cry from tearing his throat raw. He can’t tell why he’s taking it so bad, why this hurts so much fucking more than anything else he’s endured besides that stabbing in Cold Oak, but he just squeezes his eyes shut and tells himself he’s being a baby. That Dean would tell him to man up, if he were really here instead of the wet-nurse version of himself.  
   
“Dean?”  
   
“A tree, Sammy. You’re stuck under a tree.”  
   
And fuck, but that might explain it. Around here, these hulking conifers, no wonder.  
   
“I’m gonna handle it,” Dean goes on. “I’m gonna get that fucker right off you.”  
   
Sam shakes his head, no need to avoid escape by possession when they’re gonna end up there anyway, but that stokes the hellfire burning at his skin, his shoulders and fingers and spine. He’s so grateful that his legs are unaffected that it isn’t until this new wave of pain abates that he thinks to wonder how that is, and why they’re not in agony too.  
   
“No, it’s fine. We’ll get that gone and truck your ass to the hospital. Same as always. You’ll be flirting with the nurses by morning.”  
   
Sam squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates. He pictures his feet flexing, digging miniature trenches in the loose earth, but his toes send no feedback.  
   
“Dean,” he grits out, “I can’t—”  
   
“You can, Sammy. You just open those eyes up and keep ‘em that way, you got it?”  
   
He focuses on one toe, communing with it and ordering it, with no degree of uncertainty, that it had better fucking wiggle.  
   
His toe gives him nothing.  
   
He knows this is bad. Even as he says again, more desperate and frantic this time, “I can’t!” he’s trying to buck up. He tells his knees to flex, for his whole back to push up against the barrel-wide tree that must be nestled against his spine, and even though he can see it in his head, all he accomplishes is another whip of pain lancing up his spine and rattling his teeth. He cries out in earnest, probably proving just how much he’s still the little brother with the tears tracking down his face, itching at his tender scar and slipping into his open mouth along with all the caked dirt beneath his face.  
   
Then Dean’s hands are all over him, and he can feel the breezy whisper of his touch even if he’s too cold to recognize Dean’s particular brand of frost. Dean’s in his face immediately, leaning down to promise with that voice, that conviction that Sam always wants to believe.  
   
“I’m gonna get you out of here. You hear me, Sammy? We’ve been through way worse shit than this, and—”  
   
Sam pulls in a deep breath like it’s the last one he’ll need, maybe the last one he’ll get, and says, “I can’t feel my legs.”  
   
He’s quiet, especially in the face of Dean’s desperate promises, but it shuts him up real fast. Sam winces his eyes open to slits just in time to see Dean’s face. And in it, he can see the heartbreak. Dean’s launched instantly into mourning like he’s doing it for both of them, because they know what this means. This isn’t a curse, or venom, or some other side effect of some particular nastie, this is a good old fashioned spine injury.  
   
It’s permanent.  
   
Dean’s still there with his endless platitudes, his promises and denial, and despite himself Sam almost smiles. There are some things he’ll always be able to count on his big brother for, dead or not.  
   
It still doesn’t change anything though, Dean’s assurances and threats of violence far more empty than they were against the bullies that plagued Sam’s school days. And, really, it’s Sam’s fault. For leading them here, and putting them in this position. For forgetting to value his time with any Dean, even if it was the wrong one.  
   
Dean had been right about this hunt but, for once, the ‘I told you so’ would only offer a mockery of relief.  
   
This had been a job for at least two people. Sam and a haunted, temperamental car could never amount to anything more than a one man operation.  
   
Sam blinks, watching Dean grab for him and yell, but the only words he can make out are to stay, and maybe his name too. He starts to flicker, like any ghost with someplace else to be, and Sam would think it’s his own vision going except for the look of panic on Dean’s face. But then, maybe it is his vision, because the dark is coming on too fast to be night and he just wants to close his eyes again, just for a minute. He forces them open for an extra second, staring at Dean with his translucent eyes and frostbitten hands.  
   
Then Dean’s gone, all of him, and there’s no reason for Sam to keep his eyes open any longer. 

**Epilogue**  


  
Sam wakes up surrounded by trees, which is like an itch under his collar, but he can’t quite say why. He doesn’t know how long he’s been out here either, which is… weirder. The clearing he’s in is just nondescript enough that he can’t tell what part of the country they’re in; the weather too mild, the trees too young, the crickets too loud. He can’t exactly remember getting here, but a quick pass of his hand through his hair tells him his head’s not lumpy or bruised, so maybe Dean got them here. If he fell asleep at the wheel or something. Because last he remembers they were driving toward… the mountains? Colorado? But, no, they…  
   
He gives it up, not necessarily in the mood to panic, and he thinks if he can find the car he can just ask Dean. At least this Dean won’t mock him endlessly for it. Sam starts off towards where he can just see bits of asphalt through the trees, wondering if he’ll ever stop calling him _this Dean._ Especially after everything they’ve made it through.  
   
They must be somewhere very rural, a whole map page’s worth of unnamed back roads with not even a stoplight to their credit, because the air is crisp and clean and Sam feels unexpectedly healthy just breathing it in. Sleeping against that tree hadn’t done him any harm either, and Sam thinks it must have done him a world of good to catch up on his Zs, even if it did leave Dean at the wheel.  
   
The road is worn, pock-marked and pot-holed, and if there had ever been a yellow dividing line there’s nothing left to speak of it now. It’s empty, too. Not just no Impala, but no cars whatsoever. No truck horns or tires coming round the bend or patchy radios Doppler-effecting past.  Still, though, Dean wouldn’t leave him. The car’s probably just out of range, so Sam will have to look. He’ll look. There’s not much to the left, and the road to the right inspires the same notion of calm that the clearing did so he turns that way.  
   
Road slips by like time forgotten under his feet, and if he weren’t in such a backwater town he’d be a little wary of the plague-esque emptiness around him. He’s just starting to consider turning around when he hears the snap crackle pop of a cooling engine somewhere nearby. At first he thought it was twigs but, no. He knows that sound.  
   
It’s not a relief because it’s not a surprise, when the Impala’s pulled against a rockface on the opposite side of the road just around the next bend, but he’s still glad to have found it again. Dean’s leaning against the side of the trunk, ankles and arms both crossed, and he barely moves to acknowledge Sam’s arrival. It’s bright out, but Sam can still see him standing out against the dark car.  
   
“Dude, what the hell?” Sam calls as soon as he’s within sight because, yeah, he was outside of Dean’s range from the Impala, but not that far. And that should have helped Dean get even farther, besides.  
   
Dean just smiles and says, “Hey.”  
   
“I’ve been looking for you.”  
   
“I’m right here,” he says, and Sam rolls his eyes.  
   
“Dean—”  
   
“Sam. You found me. So let’s get a move on.”  
   
Sam huffs and starts the last few strides to the car before he starts to realize this picture isn’t looking exactly right. He stops mid-step, unwilling to get any closer because Dean – is not. He’s not _this Dean,_ but Sam doesn’t know which other Dean he could be. It’s not just that Sam can see him despite the sunlight, Sam can see him _in_ it, spotlighted instead of a sheer tarp used to mute the brightness of everything around him. He’s vivid, looks practically solid, and he – didn’t he – just called Sam…  
   
“Who are you?”  
   
The wrong Dean rolls his eyes and turns for the car.  
   
“Hey,” Sam calls, refusing to be sidelined in his own hallucination or nightmare or whatever this is. He doesn’t answer though, and Sam yells again. “Hey!”  
   
“What? You know who I am, Sam. Get in the car and I’ll give you three guesses anyway.”  
   
He’s using Dean’s eyes to look at Sam, green beyond belief, and Dean’s body with all its mass and presence to fool him into thinking he’s somewhere better, somewhere safe, but Sam’s not having it. He stands his ground.  
   
“I don’t know what demonic rock you’ve been slithering under, but my brother is dead.” It’s not hard to say, not anymore, but he never thought he’d have to say it to Dean’s real face, whether Dean was wearing it or not. It only strengthens Sam’s resolve to grind this dumbshit demon under his boot heel. “So who the fuck are you?”  
   
That gets the thing’s attention, makes him stop and turn all slow, like a gunslinger in an old-fashioned movie. He tilts his head and says, in a perfect imitation of Dean’s cautious but concerned voice, “Sammy. Where do you think you are?”  
   
 _My head_ , Sam thinks, but the longer his brother’s face stares at him the more he thinks that answer’ll get him laughed at. There’s really only one other option, though, one other place where Dean would be puppetted before him but still completely out of reach.  
   
It’s a trap, it must be. It explains the false sense of calm and the easy time on the road, for sure.  
   
“Is this Hell?”  
   
The thing wearing Dean sneers. “Nice, Sam. Nice. Just get in the car, alright?”  
   
“Look,” Sam starts, feeling his pockets for any kind of weapon and wishing he’d checked the woods more carefully. “I don’t know who you are, but my brother’s gonna spring this trap wide open. Dead or not, he’ll come get me.”  
   
“Hey, hey, take it easy, kiddo.” Dean’s hands are up, harmless but obviously deceiving. “Look, it’s not all that complicated. You bit the bullet, okay? But unless you did some roadside soul-bartering I don’t know about, you still haven’t earned yourself a trip downstairs.” He grins, wide and cocksure and _goddamn_ him for knowing Dean so well. “We made it to the sky mall, Sammy.”  
   
Sam’s aching just to put his fist through something, needing desperately to slink off and lick his wounds at the suggestion that the Winchester saga might not end in hellfire.  
   
“Elysian fields,” Dean offers, like Sam’s too slow to get it the first time. “Where dogs go when they die? The big pineapple in the sky?” When Sam blinks, face numb and fists hard, he says, “Just get in the car, okay?  
   
“Do I even have a choice?”  
   
“Of course you do.  You had one, you made it, and it led you here. So let’s go, time’s a wastin’.” He veers around the car to the driver’s side like that’s settled everything, and as much as Sam wants to destroy this bastard, he can’t just let him walk away either.  
   
“Fine,” he says reluctantly. “I can drive.”  
   
“That’s what you think, grandma.”  
   
“Look. _Dean_.” The name is sour in the back of his throat like it’s never been before. “I’ve been driving just fine without you.”  
   
“No, Sam, you’ve been driving just fine _with_ me. It’s my baby, I’m driving her.”  
   
Then he yanks the door open and drops himself inside, leaving no room for argument. Sam grits his teeth and sighs because, Dean or not, these are definitely his bullshit macho antics. A week ago, Sam would have said he missed them.  
   
“So,” he says, once he’s crowbarred himself into the other side of the bench seat. He needs a new strategy but, for that, he’ll need to figure out the rules first. “This is Heaven, huh?”  
   
“Yup.”  
   
Dean’s fingers drum on the steering wheel, drawing Sam’s attention and shocking him just a little when they make a steady pattering noise, like soft rain.  
   
“So how come we’re the only two here?”  
   
Sam’s expecting an easy answer, some placating bullshit that he’ll have to parse out for the truth, but that’s not what he gets. He gets more exaggerated finger-drumming, and Dean’s eyes averted out the window. Sam doesn’t let his stare ease up.  
   
“Apparently,” Dean says with an over-easy shrug, “everyone gets their own. Unless…” More drumming. “Unless you share.”  
   
Sam snorts. “And we have to share?”  
   
“Dude, I told you.” He sounds annoyed, pointing an oversensitive and pissed off finger at Sam. Even his nails are the same, short and haggard, bitten down and permanently jagged and dirty. “You had a choice. Unless you eenie meenie miney moed your way here, you wanted this.”  
   
“And you? You chose this too?”  
   
Dean rolls his neck and looks away again. “’M here, aren’t I?”  
   
Sam scoffs. He’s gone soft, what with all of the current Dean’s straight answers and honest motives. He’s forgotten how avoidant Dean could be, how he’d admit his deepest secrets only so long as you could never quote him on them. Not that – not that this is Dean. He shakes that thought out of his head. Just a good character study.   
   
“How do you even know this stuff?”  
   
“Cas. He dropped in, all woe is I, mutiny, mutiny. Kept telling me not to worry ‘cause some asshat named Zachariah bit the dust. But, uh, yeah. I got in a few questions edgewise.”  
   
“Sounds like you had some time to kill.”  
   
He cranes his neck even farther away this time, like there’s something just outside the window that Sam can’t see and Dean can’t not see.  
   
“What do you want me to say, Sam? That I’ve been sitting on my ass for three weeks? That it was only _ten of your earth minutes_?” He adopts one of those baritone voices from the old Twilight Zones they used to watch in marathons, but it’s the self-deprecating smile, like he thinks it’s funny but doesn’t expect Sam to, that really stings. It’s so, Jesus, bone-deep familiar. He can’t believe he’d almost forgotten it.  
   
“Ten minutes?” he manages. “Really?”  
   
“How the fuck do I know? It was however long it took you to kick off after it was obvious you were going to.”  
   
“Well, fine. If this is our joint Heaven, how come nothing changed when I decided to bunk down with you?”  
   
Dean snorts and leans against the door so he can fish the keys out of his pocket. “It totally did. You upped the level of suck on our tape collection in two seconds flat.”  
   
He gives Sam a dirty look, just emphasizing exactly how shitty his taste is, but Sam says, “That’s it?”  
   
“That’s what? That’s enough, Sam.”  
   
“That’s all I want? You laid the floor plan for our _entire existence_ and all I wanted was better music?”  
   
He can see how offended Dean is – this creature on Dean’s behalf or, or, whatever. He can see it in how he rears his head back like Sam’s just physically swiped at him before he purposely moves himself back to center. “I dunno, Sam,” though the words are anything but unsure. “What else were you expecting?”  
   
“Not this.”  
   
“Well, fine.” He jabs the keys in the ignition and cranks the engine, hard. It whines, a far cry from the purr it used to give when Dean was possessing it, and it nearly drowns him out. “This ain’t your slice of paradise? What is? What do you want in your Heaven, Sam? Stanford?”  
   
Sam grits his teeth. “Shut up.”  
   
Dean just gets louder. “Is that it? You want your coffee shops and your domestic bliss and your fucking GPSes!”  
   
“Fuck you,” Sam yells back, filling the muggy-hot cabin with more noise than it can hold. “I want what I’ve always wanted! My brother back.”   
   
Dean yanks his eyes up to Sam, still and wounded in a way Sam can’t begin to handle as it dawns on him. It sluices across his back like ice water, then down his throat and in his ears, cutting off any chance of saying something else. There’s only one thing that stopped the life he lived from being the life he wanted, one thing to make this place all he needs, and he’s been calling it a demon for twenty minutes.  
   
Dean. The real Dean, who dodges questions and orders him around. Who’s being a complete jerk because all he wants to do is share Heaven with Sam.  
   
The realization must show on Sam’s face because Dean drops his ire and slides right back into the old stand-by.  
   
“Hey, hey. Come on. None of that. We made it to the Big Top, Sammy. Long as they don’t check IDs.”  
   
Sam nods, but he still needs to scrape a hand past his eyes to look at all convincing. And even that must be sub-par, because Dean still says, “Seriously. We’re here. Let’s just take it and go, alright?”  
   
He nods again. He can do this. He’s got what he wanted and he’s not going to piss Dean off for the second time already by doing something stupid like emoting at him. He doesn’t need to – he’s _happy_ – it’s just—  
   
Dean looks _so_ solid. Sam remembers it, knows exactly how warm and unyielding his brother should feel under his hand, and he needs to – he just has to check. Once. To be sure.  
   
Dean’s a thousand arm lengths away because Sam has to keep reaching forever. Each inch that he feels nothing is more and more convincing that he won’t ever, that Dean’s just an illusion and Sam had better stop now if he doesn’t want to shatter it. Dean’s cocked an eyebrow though, is eying his stretched fingers like Sam’s completely off his rocker, and eventually just huffs a sigh and says, “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”  
   
He grabs Sam’s hand with his, yanking it toward him and dropping it directly onto his own shoulder.  
   
“Ya happy now?”  
   
Sam doesn’t answer. Dean’s shirt is dry, the cotton rough and stiff, but Dean’s body heat seeps through it so quickly Sam almost feels burned. Dean’s a furnace, an oven warmer set on low, a perfect, living, 98.6. It doesn’t take any conscious thought to curl his fingers right into the muscled meat of his shoulder because now that Sam’s got it, he’s never going to let this go again.  
   
They both end up in the middle of the long seat, legs awkwardly stuck in their own footwells, and it’s probably all Sam’s doing but that hasn’t stopped him yet. His arms reach all the way around Dean, sagging into the crooks of his elbows and overlapping across his back, and Sam can’t help but marvel at how detailed he is. It’s all there, each knob of his spine and the whole chunk of skin that’s missing from a banshee back in – _before_. His shirt there is almost damp with sweat in the muggy car, which Sam’s definitely not helping any, and it triggers one sense memory after another of hot summers with Dad telling them not to kick the back of the seat and awkward patch-ups while they were followed too closely by the Feds to stop for a clean room.  
   
Dean, too, is just like he always was, squirming and making sure Sam knows it. His hands come up to Sam’s shoulder blades, half patting, half bracing, and to his credit he puts up with several seconds of Sam’s leech routine before really trying to push away.  
   
“Come on, Sam. You’re getting feelings all over my Heaven.”  
   
Sam pushes his forehead against Dean’s collarbone and tries to soak up as much of him as he can before he has to stop. It really is too hot for this, both their t-shirts now sticking to them uncomfortably, but he’ll care about that later.  
   
“Seriously. We’re in the car, dude. That’s ten extra awkward points right there.”  
   
But Dean will just have to let this slide as another annoying thing his little brother does. Sam lifts his head, and is only halfway ashamed at how completely wrecked his voice sounds.  
   
“Nineteen,” he whispers clumsily against Dean’s ear.  
   
“Okay, Sam,” Another awkward pat. “You do that.”  
   
He grips harder, probably bruising Dean’s skin but that in and of itself is a phenomenon so new and old he can’t manage to be sorry.  
   
“Years,” he explains. “I’ve been driving without you for nineteen years.”  
   
There’s a beat before Dean says, “Jesus, Sammy.” Then his hands pull back, but only to curl entirely around Sam’s back, finally giving as good as he’s getting. “I didn’t know it was that long.”  
   
Sam soaks it all up, getting in the span of a minute what Dean’s ghost had been aiming to give him for nearly twenty years, and then he straightens up.  
   
“How, how long did you think it was?”  
   
Dean raises a level palm and wobbles it. “Time was, you know. Iffy.”  
   
Sam’s kind of aghast. “So, you don’t remember it?” Not that it was the golden years, but—  
   
“’Course I remember it.” Dean shrugs haphazardly. “Remember you getting your ass beat a lot.”  
   
“Hey—” Sam interrupts, and Dean’s self-assured grin does nothing to appease him.  
   
“Lots o’ running like a girl. And, yeah, some off-key singing too.”  
   
“Hey,” Sam says again, smacking Dean in the chest, and Dean laughs when it thunks the wind straight out of him. He still manages to hit back, though, catching Sam right in the breastbone, and Sam groans through a short laugh of his own.  
   
Dean gets his hand back on the gearstick, easing the Impala through a shallow trench and back on the road, saying, “You ready to head out now?”  
   
Sam cranks the window to handle some of the heat, rearranges his feet more comfortably in the footwell because he still doesn’t quite fit, and then finally scans the land before them.  
   
“Where are we going?”  
   
Dean’s got the smug grin and eyebrow-waggle out immediately. He nods along like there’s some song on the radio and slaps a hand on the dashboard. When he pulls it back he’s holding a tiny newspaper clipping Sam hadn’t even seen before, and he takes it between pinched fingers.  
   
The headline reads, in bold letters, ELVIS SPOTTED! and below that, _Reports confirm, he is in the building._  
   
Sam blinks, rubbings his fingertips together through the newsprint like it’s a mirage that’ll disintegrate in his hands, and says, “Where did you even get this?”  
   
“Cas brought it,” Dean says, like that answers anything. Sam’s doesn’t know if he’s reeling over the thought that they’re hunting The King or that Heaven has tabloids. With a sense of humor as ancient as it is, apparently.  
   
“Dean. Elvis is dead.”  
   
“And so are we, Sam. So are we.”  
   
Dean guns it then, shifting through first and second gear like they’re afterthoughts, and stale air whips in through the windows, rustling Sam’s bangs into his face. Dean’s got that dog-out-a-window look, eyes squinted and grin loose, and when Sam catches sight of himself in the sideview mirror he’s not even surprised to see a different version of himself staring back. The pink, keloid scar dividing his face is gone, just like the white temples and the frown lines and the creases in his forehead. The only shock is how very young he looked, how baby-faced and gangly compared to the body he spent most of his time roaming the country in. Come to think of it, Dean might even be younger than when he last saw him too – sharper, fresher, and Sam would bet that if he rolled up his brother’s shirt sleeve, there’d be nothing but that pale, spotted skin across his shoulder.  
   
“Pick some tunes, would ya?”  
   
Sam nods and tries to think of a good album for the drive before he remembers that Dean means actually looking through the tapes in the glove box. They all rattle around in the ripped John Deere box Sam had stopped using decades ago, and sure enough there’s two tapes of Sam’s tucked at the end of one row: Janis Joplin and Foo Fighters.  
   
Dean eyes them with disgust, and preemptively flicks the radio on even though there’s nothing but Jesus radio. “I hope you didn’t get too used to picking out your own whiny rock, ‘cause it’s never touchin’ my baby again.”  
   
His cock and swagger is back with a vengeance, and as much as Sam can’t believe he forgot what it was like, he also can’t believe it was ever this blatant. He knows it was. It’s like pulling out a favorite movie from childhood. Some parts are dated and repetitive, but knowing all the lines is the best part, and it’ll always be a favorite.  
   
This isn’t like any paradise Sam had ever pictured. The hot vinyl of the seat still sticks to the back of his neck, as usual, and the front seat reeks like there’s a taco truck selling chimichungas that Dean likes to frequent. But Sam’s riding shotgun again, and as his brother decides that Graceland must have the hottest chicks ever, Sam thinks… yeah.  
   
“You know. I’ve actually had enough of those albums for one lifetime.” He decides to go classic and pops in Zeppelin IV. 

~*~  
END  
~*~

  
****   


**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't already checked out [kalliel](http://kalliel.livejournal.com)'s master [ Art Post](http://kalliel.livejournal.com/189373.html) and left her some love, you should. She's also got links to several art drafts that didn't make it in time for the final post, and those are sincerely awesome too. Definitely worth checking out. 
> 
> Also, I feel compelled to comment a little on where this idea of casper!Dean came from. Not, uh, Casper, as the name would suggest. It's a theme the show has actually touched on several times - first in Home, where Mary was both conscious and protective of her boys, so much so that once her job was done, she was no longer tied to the house. It was more prevalent in The Real Ghostbusters (5x09) where the first ghost they burned was actually protecting the old hotel from another, more violent spirit. The theme came up a few other times, but those were the main two that really gave me this idea. 
> 
> And lastly, I must remember elveys_stuff, is beyond awesome in every way, and helped me make this so much better than it was.


End file.
